


and times that are broken (can often be one again)

by 13pens



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Breaking Cycles, F/F, Family, Gen, Post-Canon, two things can be true at once
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 07:41:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 39,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25347139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13pens/pseuds/13pens
Summary: Life after the War. It seems nearly idyllic. Dutch & Co. take down man-eating aliens; the Kendry-Kin Rits prepare to rule the universe—all while trying to raise their psychic half-alien half-human son (or memory nephew brother son, in Yala’s special case). It's a delicate balancing act, but one they're all capable of deftly handling.That is, until the visions come.In other words:Sometimes a family is an infant teen, his dad, a former evil dictator, a centuries old mass murderer, and her daughter-sister-clone-self. Deal with it.
Relationships: Aneela/Delle Seyah Kendry
Comments: 47
Kudos: 56





	1. RIVER - prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Just a summer love letter to Killjoys, which gave me all of my gay rights in the week that I watched it. I love this family.
> 
> This fic also features Dutch/Kendry because I still believe I was robbed (Kendry has Two Hands), and a little bit of Dutch/D'av. 
> 
> **Please see notes at the beginning of every chapter for full content warnings applicable to those chapters.**
> 
> Title is from Hall & Oates’ “Out of Touch.” Enjoy ;)

Jaq’s fortnight-long birthday will be D’avin’s idea, though Delle Seyah will say that it was hers all along. Developmentally fourteen in the whopping span of four months, Dad will say that it’s only right that he gets to have one day for every milestone they missed on account of his hybridity. After a period of bickering that Jaq only half concerns himself with, the “Parent Council” will decide on this: one week on Qresh, doing this the “right” and “royal” way, and one week on Westerley, “like sane human beings.” 

Well, the Westerlyn sanctuary lands on Leith, at least. Reconstruction plans will have only just been started, and with The Lady’s hatchlings still at large all over the J, adjusting to new life on Qresh and ugh, starting home school?—the two weeks is really more of a “whenever we can.”

Still. Fourteen birthdays. Jaq won’t mind the gifts.

He’ll get a set of knives from Dutch, ones that can fit in his boot, belt, and in his sleeve. His Uncle Johnny won’t be present on account of his second sabbatical, but he’ll holocall to tell him that he’ll have Newcy integrated on a ship that will be Jaq’s when he gets back; for the meantime, he sends him some of his comic books. Dad will give him a tin box full of games he and Johnny used to play as kids, with a reminder that no matter what they say on Qresh, politically-driven murder is not a valid sport. Jaq will get his first taste of hokk at The Royale’s temporary location on Leith and will spit it out immediately, but will feel warm with the laughter and pats on the back that everyone gives him. Zeph gifts him a framed picture of the ultrasound she took when Delle Seyah was in her third trimester at three weeks. 

Pip’s contribution: “community” theatre, a play about Jaq’s origins and life thereafter. Despite pleas that they’d like to live for another one of Jaq’s birthdays, he’ll record it for his mothers, citing Dutch’s robotic portrayal of Aneela and Pree’s frighteningly accurate Delle Seyah as too good to keep to himself. (Mom will never admit it herself, but she’ll be resentfully hypnotized by Prima Dezz’s performance—he got the mannerisms and all.)

On Qresh, the hoodies, hokk, and the Westerlyn ruggedness are exchanged for tradition and formalities. Mom will fit him with purple and gold silk shirts and jewel-studded coats, present him rings and pendants that used to be her late grandfather’s. With a razor, she’ll clean up where baby curls have overtaken his hairline. The celebratory banquet held at the Kendry Estate risks being overwhelming to his senses, but the pressure to perform as a two-house heir will ease once the plate covers are removed, and the smell of butter and spices reminds him of what he loves most: good food. No one will say a word when he uses the wrong fork.

Ma’s gift will be his favorite of them all. On the last night, when the festivities have been scrubbed clean from his body and his bones are ready for sleep, she’ll tell him a story:

_When the nights were long,_  
_and the days were deep,_  
_there lived a lonely wolf._  
_The wolf spent thousands of moon-turns in solitude,_  
_and soon_  
_that loneliness bloomed_  
_into an unrelenting rage._  
_The wolf was feared across the stars,_  
_for she showed no man mercy,_  
_and her name was a curse_  
_to those who heard it._

_Then,_  
_one day,_  
_the wolf came across a bunny._

(“A bunny.” 

“Yes, Jaq. A bunny.”)

_The bunny was smart_  
_and conniving, but most of all_  
_she was brave._  
_She did not cower_  
_to the wolf. She did not grovel_  
_when the wolf was angry._  
_The wolf knew intimately how it felt_  
_to be known but never seen,_  
_and the bunny always did both._  
_Very quickly,_  
_the wolf fell in love_  
_with the bunny,_  
_and very quickly, the bunny_  
_fell in love with her._

  
_The bunny gave her a little bear,_  
_whom no one in all the galaxy_  
_expected to love so, but did all the same._  
_The wolf never forgot_  
_that she was ever lonely._  
_She never forgot_  
_that she was ever angry._  
_But as sure as there were_  
_stars in the sky,_  
_she hoped that her little bear_  
_would never feel those things._  
_That together, they would rule the stars,_  
_and together, they would always be a family._

Jaq will hope so, too.


	2. AVULSION

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content Warnings: physical violence, blood mentions, derealization mentions**

_2.9.1063 — Quad Orbit._

He appears to be alone in this forest, but if Jaq has learned anything from anyone, he knows he’s done for if the assessment stops there.

He closes his eyes to listen. It’s like painting in reverse, Dutch had said. Cataloging the noticeable in the foreground—the crunching of leaves overhead as the wind blows, the chirp of birds, his breaths. Then, attuning his ear to the midground—extending to hear direction, volume, changes; the cadence of the birdsongs, knowing by the flap of wings and polyphony that there are at least four around; his percussive heartbeat; the snap of twigs under feet, be they paws or boots. Finally, the background—not just direction, but distance. If you pay enough attention you can hear how much open space there is between you and a target, the speed at which an object moves. The way the air shifts when sounds travel through them and refracts, clashes with the trunks of trees, gets tangled in their branches, or hits the ground flat.

“‘ _Painting in reverse’,”_ D’av had scoffed then. “So pretentious. It’s fucking echolocation.”

Jaq had liked Dutch’s metaphor better. When he decides the time is right, he opens his eyes, turns around, and throws the knife square at D’av’s middle. It stops at the hilt, sticking out of his vest. D’av flinches as if hit by a stone.

“Aw come on,” D’av says, the life meter above his head plummeting until it’s just an empty bar. The knife flickers between its rendered form and the virtual triangles its constructed of.

“Fuck yeah,” Jaq whoops, earning a stern glare that he knows not to take seriously. His dance of success is cut short when a plasma ball splats right over his face. In real life, it would have yielded a rather ugly result.

“D’avin, zero; Jaq, three; but Dutch, eight, baby!” Dutch cheers with a punch of the air from where she is perched high on a tree. “Beat _this_ bat, bitches.”

“I thought you agreed to let me win every round.”

“Rule of thumb, Jaq? Don’t take an assassin’s word for anything.”

Jaq flicks the switch on his temple, then removes the virtual reality headset from over his eyes. The other two follow suit, and the stifling forest is replaced with the white enclosures of Dutch and D’av’s ship.

The ship is no Lucy, but it’s welcoming all the same. Dutch will complain often that the bright white at every turn is an eyesore, but Jaq doesn’t mind. He’ll say it reminds him of Red 17; his dad will look at him strangely.

“ _Jaq’s curfew is in approximately three hours and twelve minutes_ ,” the ship’s voice chimes in a certain mother’s voice. “ _Deliver him later than that and I will hand you your own asses_.”

“Yes, Shell Seyah,” Dutch sighs in a sing-song appeasement as she puts away the headsets in their wall slots. “D’av, I really can’t fathom how you agreed to let Her Majesty install this AI on our ship.”

D’av shrugs. “Better than nothing.”

“ _I can hear you, you know_ ,” Shell Seyah says.

“I better get going,” Jaq concedes as he takes his jacket from a hook and slips his arms into the sleeves. “I’m getting hungry anyway. Shell Seyah, remind Dad to get some real food around here.”

“ _Of course, Jaqobis Ozzman. Shall I attach a deadline with a consequence of your choice?_ ”

“Hey now,” D’av warns with a finger at the surveillance camera. Jaq laughs.

When they enter the cockpit to set coordinates for the Kendry Estate, Jaq sees that the holos from the last hatchling mission just the morning of are still up. It was particularly an ugly one, according to the anecdotes. Dutch thinks she may get a scar out of it, and laments because it’s not even a sexy-looking scar; is brought down even more when Shell Seyah sadly concurs.

Jaq takes in the screens in quick saccades. “There are a lot of them, still.”

“Yeah, little spider-scorpion shits,” Dutch says from her seat. She faces the screen and flicks a button to close it. “Not to worry though. They’ve spread out but in manageable clusters.”

“Hm.”

“You said you and your moms are going on a vacation next week?” D’avin asks.

Jaq nods. “Yeah. Just a few days. We’re visiting Ma’s parents.”

He catches Dutch’s shoulders raise, just a centimeter. “Oh,” she says. “How are you feeling about that?”

It’s a weird question, Jaq thinks. He doesn’t feel much about it at all. “She’s kind of nervous, I think.”

The power goes down before either of them can ask anything else. The white lights dim out, the red and green speckles of the console flicker and fade, and the quiet rumbling of the ship silences dishearteningly.

“Shell Seyah?” Dutch calls. “You good?”

There’s a few seconds of nothing. D’av bends over the console and cranes his head to look through the windshield. “There aren’t any other ships nearby. Did we hit a deadzone? In the _Quad_?”

The indicator light for Shell Seyah buzzes back on, as if she were jolting awake. “ _I detect a disturbance. I have no way of saying this gracefully. There is something crawling uncomfortably through my innards_.”

“There were about five more graceful ways to say that,” Dutch says with agitation that isn’t actually directed at the AI. She and D’av get to their feet and unholster their blasters; Dutch hands Jaq a dagger from the side of the pilot seat for measure.

“I already have one.”

“Well, then double wield or something. Be creative.”

Sliding out a switchblade from his belt, Jaq holds both knives and follows behind Dutch and D’av out of the cockpit and to the hallways.

Jaq breathes, listens. Foreground: Dutch and D’av, the clicks and taps of their footfalls, controlled and even breaths. Midground: metallic rhythms overhead, far away. Background—

The vision starts before he can complete the analysis. At first, it hits him like it usually does, like he has stepped into a dense fog that he has to wade through to see what is waiting on the other end. It almost takes shape, dark chitin and claws. But then something changes—he hears a song.

They reach the loading deck when a clang reverberates through the ship, and just then the power returns.

The lights flick on to reveal a hatchling, lunging straight for Jaq.

It’s a small one, but it’s fast. It takes a leap before D’av and Dutch can aim. Jaq pulls himself out of the haze of the visions and plunges back into the present to raise his arms and cut deep into the soft underside where the plates of its hard exoskeleton meet. He stumbles backward at the impact but remains upright, and it’s mouth is dangerously close to Jaq’s face, fluids splattering around him.

Then he sees its black eyes, nested so deep you would miss it, shining and then dulling like a marble rolling through a dusty surface. Jaq keeps his arms steady, twisting the knives deeper. With a final thrust, it sags, claws, legs, and atrocious sucker-tail clattering onto the floor.

The weight of the hatchling begins to hurt Jaq’s wrists, so he pushes the body forward with his shoulders to pull out the knives. His hands come out a viciously dark green, and his clothes are similarly stained.

“Holy shit,” Dutch breathes.

“I’m fine,” Jaq assures. “I’m good.”

“Must have hitchhiked somehow. We didn’t get all of them.” D’av looks up at Shell Seyah’s green eye. “And a certain _someone_ didn’t think to do a scan prior to leaving the site.”

“ _Okay, but did you die? No._ ”

“Jaq might have,” Dutch retorts, and walks up to him to place a hand on his shoulder. She nudges his chin to inspect him, then finding no damage, smiles. “But you’re too good for that, aren’t you, you little shit?”

Jaq huffs a laugh that brings him out of the mild stupor of being drenched in hatchling blood. “Yeah.”

They look down at the carcass that continues to bleed out at Jaq’s feet. This time when the fog clouds his sense of the present again, he can’t see through it. Lights and shapes that don’t align with anything he knows. He hears words that sound more like clanging.

He clears his throat, closes that mental door. “Should we bury it or something?”

D’av and Dutch share a look, the thought unconsidered and showing on the smoothing of their brows.

“We’ll take care of it, buddy,” D’av says. “Go take a shower. Both of your moms will shoot me and only me in the face if you come home looking like this.”

“Okay,” Jaq nods. He walks back to the main corridor, not before awkwardly handing back the dagger to Dutch.

***

They land with one and a half hours to spare, which his stricter mother says is still cutting it close. “He has a night routine, you know,” she says, scolding them even while inviting them inside for drinks.

D’av comes clean about the hatchling incident, as per the Parent Council agreements. He says maybe Kendry’s programmers could make Shell Seyah’s security protocols a little tighter; she says please, she’s not your babysitter.

Aneela sits by Jaq with her hand placed warmly over his shoulder. She tells him how proud she is that he protected his family, and in the same breath warns D’avin that if it happens again, Shell Seyah will be the least of his worries.

Jaq nods or laughs or grimaces accordingly. But he’s still thinking about the black marble eyes.

* * *

_2.11.1063 — Kendry Estate._

Delle Seyah Kendry has always been a morning person. Of all the dastard things, Dutch has told her more than once, this one makes her the most sociopathic. Well, Kendry would reply, it’s not healthy to deny yourself a few hours of peace before wreaking tyrannic havoc upon the rest of the Quad.

It takes only a few deep breaths to get her out of bed when the sun is in the middle of rising, though now these days she has the added ritual of dropping a copious amount of kisses on Aneela’s sleepy cheek, who stirs to smile, return a kiss or two, and then resumes snoring like a contented lion. It’s important, see, to establish routine, especially when said routine had been disrupted by getting murdered and all the subsequent events thereafter.

Servants and other household inhabitants are forbidden to disturb her for the first two or three hours, even if it is urgent, with Jaq qualifying as an exception. Sometimes he’ll join her up on the rooftop lounge after a sleepless night and nap on the sofa while she has her coffee with exactly one tablespoon of condensed milk, after which she’ll stretch her body on a mat, play an affirmation tape. Other times he’ll remain in his room sleeping like a log, waking only just an hour or so before Aneela finally does.

Today it’s just her, which does her just fine. By noon she’ll have been in her office reviewing their financial accounts for a few hours, while pretending to listen during the conference calls with Governor Prima Dezz and a few Leithian spokespeople. Then she’ll excuse herself after an intolerable amount of farmland squabble to attend to more pressing matters, such as lunch with her family.

Bitch, you’ve gone so soft, Pree will say. Go suckle on a robo-goat, Kendry will reply.

***

“He’s late,” Aneela observes with no bite, sat patiently at the central table.

“He’s probably in the kitchen trying to charm our cooks for extra pastries,” Delle Seyah says, without looking up. “He’s gotten comfortable here. I’m glad, but it shows too well.”

She flips through the pages of the heavy tome cradled in her arms as she walks languidly back and forth, the reverb of the Kendry library’s high ceilings catching the crisp. In the chaos of everything, they’ve found the time, finally, for this. Jaq doesn’t care much for it, but the reality is that living on Qresh means hitting the ground running, and there is a lot he needs to learn. She doesn’t believe Aneela cares much for it either, but no matter what she says, an effective queen knows her damn history. So of course, they must be taught, and who better for their tutelage than Kendry herself. A perfect fit, two birds with one stone.

Now a week running and results have varied, to her chagrin. Aneela more than once has hijacked her lectures with more of her stories, anecdotes from the collapsed hullen hive mind, immediately transforming Jaq’s slumped resignation or knit brow into leaning in, rapt and hungry. Those days Delle Seyah sighs, but takes a chair and listens. Just like her wife (wife-to-be, details), there could never be any real bite, not one that hurt, at least. After all, Aneela is Aneela, and Jaq is Jaq. And the hullen detail that distinguished their family would protect them from the political ramifications of a derailed pace.

They hear Jaq’s footfalls, easily identifiable for the way he vaguely drags his feet on the marble, and the curt muffled greeting from the guard as he opens the door for Jaq.

“You’re late,” Delle Seyah says, looking at him with a quirk of her lips that would be menacing to anyone else, but lands soft on him. “And you come empty handed, too.”

“Sorry,” is all he murmurs, in lieu of his hallmark smiling eyeroll. He plops onto the chair alongside Aneela. Kendry frowns.

“Is something the matter, Jaq?”

“No.”

She shares a glance with Aneela across the table. In her periphery she can see Jaq sit upright and reconsider.

“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” he amends, and Delle Seyah loosens at the knowledge that he has learned this from her. “Let’s just start the lesson.”

Aneela puts a delicate hand on the back of his shoulder and smiles at her, giving a nod. Delle Seyah, takes a moment, then seals her worry and stores it for later.

“Okay…” She grins tentatively, closing the tome and cradling it as she walks slowly along the length of the table with a mischievous clack. “First thing on the agenda—” She stops at the center. “A pop quiz.”

Jaq clicks his teeth; Aneela frowns.

“Mom, come on.”

“ _Kendry._ ”

Delle Seyah’s wide smile catches on her lips.

***

When they are done, Aneela retreats to her chamber to holo-call Yala, and Delle Seyah and Jaq shelve the tomes and re-sort the space. It was Jaq’s idea the first time, which confounded her at first, but she very quickly caught on when he would walk down each shelf, run his finger through the rows of aged spines and pull one out, and ask her about them.

That was the thing about Jaq. He kept surprising her with the mundane. It was this way since the first time he reached out to hug her, knowing only the fact that he was hers.

He takes her by surprise again when he asks her to read _The Jester’s Repertoire_ to him.

“Okay,” she says with skepticism, not just for the choice but the hazy way he requests it. “But only a few pages. I have to prepare for the next council vote. Sixteen amendments to draft, if you can believe it. _Bureaucracy_.”

They settle back at the central table. She watches his eyes look distractedly at the gilded print on the cover, how his shoulders slump, and tracks it still when her voice is of someone pretending not to see it.

“The pranks are gaudy, but I took inspiration from it as a child occasionally. One time I stained Liam’s teeth bright pink, and he couldn’t get it out for perhaps two months.”

A ghost of smile passes over Jaq’s face, his posture lifting ever so slightly, and the heaviness of it is her confirmation. She didn’t think anything of it when he excused himself early during lunch, and now she knows she should have.

He waits for her to open the book, but she folds her hands over it and leans toward him instead, halfway conspiratorial and halfway lecturing.

“I’m going to ask you this again,” she says, making extra effort that her words are gentle and not a prelude to torture, as she is much more accustomed to. “And a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ can suffice. I won’t force it out of you.” She tilts her head slightly. “Is there something wrong?”

He sighs in that way Jaq does that makes him seem like he’s a hundred years old, cradling his dipped head on arms propped on the table.

Jaq takes a moment. “I’m seeing weird things.” Kendry watches what she can see of his mouth, if it’ll open again to say more. He lifts his head to look at her, reading her or her future; perpetually looking off at a cube she can’t see yet. “You want me to explain, still.”

She blinks, aware of the vague knit on her brow. “It’s your call,” she says, matter-of-fact. But it’s true, she does want him to. What she used to consider lying in wait just now feels like foolish inaction. She thinks of the forest, how his Sight showed him the world unfolding like paper, and how despite that her son still needed his mother’s word. “But you can trust me. You know that.”

He bounces his leg. “It isn’t that. I just can’t explain what I’m seeing.”

Kendry nods slowly. “Okay. If tawdry literature is what you need right now, sure. But I’ll have to tell your mother about this. And if this doesn’t pass in the next couple of days, I’m going to let your father and Dutch know, too. Non-negotiable, I’m afraid.”

A wry smile reaches Jaq’s eyes, and he mirrors her posture in that unhurried way of his when there’s nothing to run from. “And if I don’t accept, Seyah Kendry?”

“I’ll have you executed,” she deadpans, then smiles when he becomes all teeth and dimples.

“Okay,” Jaq says, content with the conclusion. He looks up at the stained glass windows lining the upper walls; she follows his gaze. “Pink teeth?” He turns back to her with a playfully skeptical expression. “That’s pretty weak, even for you.”

Kendry scoffs in mock offense. “Well let me tell you about the time I tricked him into eating from a bowl that…”

The tales of her youthful mischief enthrall him, and though she’ll remind him that royals do not _wheeze laughter,_ she’ll do nothing to enforce it.

* * *

The light falls. The Company’s noisy machinations are left at their bedroom doors with their shoes. Documents and documents—when had Aneela ever signed _documents—_ remain on Kendry’s desk for the morning.

Perhaps this was what was meant by _when the days were deep_. Aneela had yearned for freedom so long, she would have never guessed that it would look like this: exhaling the perpetual stiffness of her shoulders, the nightly ritual of tubes connecting at the backs of their necks. Falling into place and into bed with Kendry, whose love for her changes form throughout the day, first in powerfully warm gazes that ground her—then in Kendry’s face wiped clean of powders and paints, hair loose and mussed, flirting with Aneela like a young girl during her first courtship. The warm smell she would catch hints of throughout the day now filling her senses. No voice in her head, just Kendry’s in her ear.

She loves her. She loves watching the way Kendry’s eyes track Aneela’s hands that are always slightly shaking, following them as they trace lines along her bare forearm. They lie with languor, careful not to press their bodies on the tubes carrying Aneela’s green.

The process has been painfully slow, though Kendry has never shown displeasure for it. How _Kendry_ of her, too, to conveniently leave the implications of a slow hullenization unaddressed when it means she can be like this with her every night, for many nights. It’s how she knows with certainty that she’d never be a pawn in Delle Seyah’s games. And it goes without saying, that she _loved_ to play.

Not that this was without its own merrymaking. At such a sedated pace, they’ve had to test the hullenization stages in rather creative ways that didn’t involve constantly slicing open Kendry’s palm. No, at Kendry’s request, Aneela leaves love marks all over her lower neck and clavicle, and with an old pocket-watch lies back to time the healing process. Yala calls it “pretty disgusting, I wish you hadn’t told me that.” Aneela thinks it is rather resourceful science. Fun, too.

The deep purples have faded just a little in half an hour’s time—Kendry will just have to settle for masking them the morning after.

“A joy for your thoughts?” Kendry says low, after a while.

“No thoughts. Just a love for looking at you,” Aneela replies.

Kendry laughs, sweet and crystalline. “Get in line.”

“I am the line.” Aneela kisses her as soon as the muscles of Kendry’s face quirk, and effectively robs her of the chance to say that she made little sense. Kendry presses back with no complaint.

Pulling away, Aneela lets her mouth turn downward, fingertips now rested on Kendry’s collarbone. “We need to talk about timelines.”

Kendry props her head up with her arm, gazes down at her through her lashes. “Any in particular?”

“The eternity that I’m going to spend with you,” Aneela smiles, a reflex to her endless coquetry, and then refocuses. “You’re vulnerable in this state, Kendry.”

“I would agree.” She coyly ghosts her fingers over the marks around her neck and laughs at the way Aneela’s eyelids droop in temptation. Then her demeanor matches the one Aneela is offering. “I know. I consulted with that mouth breather you’re so fond of.”

“Zephyr,” Aneela smiles.

“Her.” Kendry waves a dismissive hand. “Her conjecture is that this is because it’s the second time. There’s a slight ‘ _immunity’_ now.”

The offense Kendry takes on her behalf warms her. She brings Kendry’s hand to her mouth and kisses the knuckles. “As if you could ever be immune to me.”

Kendry proves her point by enveloping her mouth with her own. They do this for a while, Aneela savoring the hot feel of her skin as the green leaves her body to enter Kendry’s in a sacred exchange; Kendry inevitably comes away with fresh new marks.

In time they remove the tubes, reseal the spots on their necks, and pull their robes over their backs. By the time Aneela has put away the equipment and resettles herself into bed, Kendry is drowsy and merely waiting for Aneela to take their favorite position of just facing one another, close enough to feel the other breathe.

Kendry looks at her through half-closed eyelids when she notices the thought-lines on Aneela’s face. “It’s rather concerning, you know,” she says, taking one of Aneela’s hands, “when I’m the one who has to go around asking others what the matter is.”

“I’m worried about Jaq,” Aneela says in shy admission. “I was already nervous about Papa’s request for our visit to Land Kin Rit, now I’m unsure of its timing.”

Her eyes are open fully now, attentive. “You can always say no. We don’t _have_ to go.”

“Hm. I’d like to see Mama. You haven’t met her yet. She’d like you, I think.”

Kendry hums. She absently caresses Aneela’s knuckles with her thumb. “Jaq will be fine.”

They’re quiet in the darkness for a few moments, and Aneela would have thought Kendry asleep if not for how she still traced laps around the back of her hand.

“What do you really think about Jaq meeting my father?”

Kendry’s thumb slows, stops. Aneela hears her take a pensive inhale. “Khlyen was a competent ally, when that was the extent of it.” There’s a twinge of pain on Kendry’s face, a moment of quiet. “As for a member of the family… perhaps not so much.”

Aneela thinks. About Yala, in particular. A centuries-old pain slowly moves up her chest.

“But he’s your father,” Kendry sighs, releasing her hand to lay her palm on Aneela’s cheek, fingers caressing her hairline. “And if you don’t want me to kill him, then I won’t.”

That flicks away any deep-seated melancholy from rising, and instead Aneela breaks into a smile. “Just because you offed yours…”

“What is a queen’s reign without a little patricide,” Kendry says, playful, kissing Aneela’s lips. “You say the word, sweetheart. I’m your champion, after all.”

“I really love you, Kendry.”

“I know.”

Aneela laughs, and kisses her until they fall asleep nose to nose.

* * *

_2.15.1063 — Land Kin Rit._

Mom pats his shoulder for him to awaken when he naps through the ship landing, and the constant part of her that bemoans that he is a Jaqobis boy gives him a pitying grimace when he wipes his drool with his sleeves.

“Remind me to get you some melatonin,” she remarks.

His other mother stands at the gate of the ship, where he joins her side to look out at the estate. He’s still developing his grasp on descriptions, still tossing things in his pool of references, so he wasn’t quite sure what to imagine when Aneela had said that Land Kin Rit had been abandoned for nearly three centuries. That perhaps it would still be achingly apparent after just two months of circulating life back into it. On four separate occasions leading up to today, she had wondered aloud if the two of them would be unimpressed with her old home; she herself hadn’t been here since uncovering her mother’s council clothes for that first day back as the lost heir.

Seeing it with his own eyes it’s different. Where the Kendry house is like a loud echo of his mother—regal and precise—the Kin Rit manor is something of a whisper of Aneela. The overgrowth of green along windowpanes that seem to have been waiting for her return; the sunbaked and wind-weathered walls exuding an aura of longing that he didn’t know walls could have. A forest of trees surrounding them like how Aneela sometimes holds him before he sleeps. Still not quite her, but a memory of her.

“It’s cool,” he says to her, with a small smile. Ma turns her head to him and returns a wide one.

“‘Cool’,” she echoes.

Delle Seyah’s hands settles on each of their shoulders. “On with it, my loves.”

They unboard the ship and walk up to main entrance, a large archway covered in twists of ivy, where Yalena and Khlyen are already waiting for them with two of their guards.

He hears Aneela’s breath hitch beside him as she runs forward to hug her mother. They smile wide and laugh loudly, and Jaq realizes then that he had never seen her like this—whenever he would run up and tackle his Dad in greeting, he had just assumed it was a _them_ thing. He realizes then that Aneela, who at home likes to terrify the Kendry relatives for fun, is somebody’s child—always has been.

Mom waits patiently beside him with an expression he can parse quiet affection from, but there’s something else to it that he can’t name.

“Please,” Ma beseeches as she turns around to face them, her mother’s hand in her own. “Meet my family. Delle Seyah Kendry of Land Kendry…”

She steps forward and elegantly takes Yalena’s extended hand, and kisses her family ring with a slight bow. “An honor to be in your presence, Yalena Yardeen. Surely you outdo your namesake in spades.”

Yalena’s eyebrow quirks. “Oh, I like you,” she says, smiling.

“And I see you’ve risen from the dead,” Mom says to Khlyen, not impolitely, and he smiles.

“I see you’ve done the same and more.”

Then their eyes settle on him, and Jaq is a little awestruck until Ma finally comes to him and places an arm around the the back of his shoulders. “…And this is Jaq, our son,” she says proudly. “Jaqobis Ozzman Kendry Kin Rit.”

“Hi,” Jaq says, and can’t help beam back at the way his grandparents look at him like he’s a wonder.

Yalena places a warm hand on his cheek the way Aneela often does. “My, my,” she says. “I have a lot to catch up on, don’t I?”

***

They have dinner, and the food settles warmly in his stomach. They still have all the things that apparently separate Qresh from the other moons like cooks and servants, a separate dining room for smaller intimate meals like this—but there’s something different about the way they are together. It’s almost as if he and Delle Seyah are outsiders, whose scrutiny or lack thereof don’t carry the same weight as his Uncle Liam’s or other members of the Eleven who come by. Aneela smiles more often, more widely. His mind returns to his realization that she was once a child. He wonders if Delle Seyah was ever somebody’s child that way. The things she had told him here and there didn’t paint that kind of picture.

Yalena asks plenty of questions. How old is Jaq now? Well, 4 months technically, give or take. Oh, he looks so much like the two of you. Does he? Do I? That’s cool. I hope he’s learning a lot from you, he seems very bright. Oh, he is. I am? Yes, little bear. If it’s not too sensitive, how did…? Oh, well, I was running experiments on the armada and when I spliced D’avin Jaqobis’ DNA, found— Long story short I ended up carrying him. Oh, I see. How unorthodox. It’s still unorthodox, Yalena. Mom, what does unorthodox mean again?

“Seyah Kendry,” Khlyen says at some point. He had been mostly listening for the duration of the multiple conversations. “I hear you’re in the process of re-hullenizing.”

“That’s right,” Kendry replies a slight crack in her voice. Despite it, she remains unaffected, cordial as she had been this entire time. Jaq references the others in the room: Yalena has a faint smile, though something there looks uneasy. Aneela is holding her breath.

Khlyen smiles warmly. “Good. I’m glad that Aneela will have you in this journey.”

“I, too,” is all Delle Seyah says, and gracefully brings a forkful of roasted vegetables into her mouth.

Jaq decides that he doesn’t like the way any of that had felt. “Um, is it too soon for desserts?”

***

It isn’t so bad after that, but whatever had grated his mother lingers with him while his grandparents seem to sweep over it.

After dinner, with the house servants preparing their rooms and unpacking their things, Jaq finds his way to the top of a turret to watch the moons settle on a starlit sky. The vast Qresh ocean twinkles like a mirror, and he feels some respite.

He’s looking at the Westerlyn moon when a vision tugs him backward, rough and abrupt in a way it’s not done before. Marble black eyes, collecting dust. Squelching, a song—

It fizzes away when he hears sandaled footsteps up the staircase. He turns his head to see Khlyen emerge, a bowl of tea in hand.

“Your mothers are wondering where you are,” he says.

“I just wanted some air.”

“Understandable,” he nods agreeably. “It’s good air, relatively.”

His grandfather leans on the stone half-wall next to Jaq, takes a sip of his tea. Jaq watches him from the corner of his eye, wonders what it is about him that made Aneela hesitate visiting, that makes Delle Seyah clip her words in near undetectable ways. So far Jaq has only ever met two fathers—his dad and then his dad’s dad. Khlyen doesn’t seem like either of them, from what he can tell.

“How are you faring on Qresh, Jaq?”

“Pretty well. Like my moms said.”

“You like it here?”

“Yeah.”

His grandfather nods slowly, eyes contemplative and distant. He takes another careful drink. “Plenty has changed since I was last here. With my family.”

Jaq thinks about how long three hundred years is. He has no idea.

“My ma doesn’t really talk about you,” Jaq states, looking back out at the Qreshi sea. “Why is that?”

Khlyen turns to him with a raised brow, which slowly comes back down as he considers. “It is a long, tumultuous story. It is exhausting to tell. War is like that.” A pause. “I wouldn’t want to trouble you with that.”

“I like stories,” Jaq tentatively offers. “Even long ones.”

He seems to look pleased. “Well…” he begins. “When the days were deep…”

The familiarity of it reaches the tip of Jaq’s tongue. “And the nights were long?”

“Yes,” his grandfather affirms with a smile. Then, turning solemn, he continues.

_When the days were deep, and the nights were long,_

_the gods gifted a king a magical tree, which bore magical fruit._

_The gods told him,_

_“Grow this fruit and eat from it._

_Plant the seeds on your lands, on your moons.”_

_So the king did. Eating from the fruit, he was_

_awarded with good health, extended life, and a calmer mind._

_The king had a daughter, a gentle princess whom he loved,_

_and wanted her to be with him always._

_So he gave her fruit from the magical tree, so that_

_she may have good health, extended life, and a calmer mind._

_But the magic in the fruit was not as it seemed._

_The king had learned too late, and his daughter_

_turned into a tree,_

_with rotting roots that infected the soil,_

_that killed all who ate what was sowed and reaped from it._

_Her health was poor. Life was forever, but her mind_

_was a tangle of those poisonous roots._

_For the good of his kind, the King dug his daughter up from the ground,_

_And kept her safe in a tower, away from any and all who wished to_

_cut her down to her trunk._

_But as the years went by, she grew restless._

_She sought soil. She sought forests. She escaped her tower._

_And so the king had no choice but to kill the tree._

_In the end, he could not. The tree was too large,_

_too powerful, too poisonous, and_

_the king, out of love for what his daughter used to be,_

_perished in her stead._

“This is a sad story,” Jaq says.

“It is a sad story,” Khlyen replies. “It is how a man tried his best to protect his loved ones, and failed.”

Jaq shifts uncomfortably, arms folding over the stone wall. “He should have never given her the fruit.”

“Perhaps,” he says. Then he smiles warmly at Jaq. “But there’s more to the story. Eventually, the tree will bloom with wonderful flowers.”

He thinks. Realizes he is the flower. “I guess so.”

“When you love your family, Jaq, sometimes you need to make the most difficult choices on your own, for their sake. And the people you love may resent you for it—but it was all for the best. I hope you can see that one day.”

Khlyen drains his tea, says his goodnights, and retreats downstairs. He lets the story settle and seep for a little longer before he decides that no coherent thoughts will really result until after he sleeps the night.

Before leaving, he takes one last look at the moons, waiting for the vision from earlier to grab him again. It doesn’t come, and he sighs a breath of relief.

* * *

_2.16.1063—Kin Rit Gardens._

While Papa tends to some business concerning land restoration, and Jaq oversleeps yet again, Aneela and Kendry spend the afternoon with Yalena discussing their wedding plans. They sit together at an outdoor table with drinks and pastries, a large parasol shielding them from the sun. Aneela remembers vaguely the times she’d wander through the gardens as a child to see her mother hosting company, right here on this spot, large brimmed sun hats, gloves, and yellow butterflies flitting around them and all.

“The _Perpetuum Pact_ ,” Mama says, impressed. “That hasn’t been invoked in centuries.”

“We’re well aware,” Kendry replies, with confidence. “But if there’s anyone who can pull off a life-long, galaxy-spanning alliance to secure peace in the Quad without being assassinated first, it’s us.”

Aneela smiles fondly at Kendry, leaning her chin on her propped elbow.

Yalena’s cheeks go apple-round as she beams in nodding agreement. “Okay, I do love the conviction. Who is in your court?”

“Yala,” Aneela answers, “of course. Then there’s Zephyr, another fellow scientist. I’m backing her plans to open universities across the Quad.”

“And Bea, of the Alcador Cluster.”

“And how of the Knight seats?”

“D’avin Jaqobis, Jaq’s genetic father,” Kendry replies. “Prima Dezz, current governor of Westerley. And my cousin Liam, mostly as a gesture. The remaining Kendrys don’t trust me to wipe them out at a moment’s notice, rightly so.”

Yalena laughs. “You’re very much like the Kendry matriarch I knew back then. I always liked your line.”

Then there’s a twitch of hesitance on her mother’s mouth; Kendry catches it immediately.

“Is that so?” she asks, friendly.

Mama makes a soft hum, takes a queenly sip out of her teacup. “I have to come clean, I suppose. Your father asked me a favor.”

Aneela’s shoulders stiffen. “What is his request?”

“Well,” she begins, setting the cup down on its saucer carefully. “You are following one of the oldest Qreshi marriage customs—one that established the Ten families in the first place. And yet you’ve spoken nothing about another old custom: having your father give you away at the wedding.”

Kendry is a millisecond away from scoffing loudly, and Aneela takes her hand under the table.

“We’re queens, for gods sake, Yalena,” she says more tamely. “No one is giving either of us away but ourselves.”

“Then a seat with the Knights, then? I’ve counted, you have an empty spot on each side.”

Kendry goes icy and sharp. “Quite odd that for such an important request your husband is not even present—”

“I’ll think about it,” Aneela cuts in, refusing to have any of this unfold into in-law squabble. The petty humanness of it has begun to irk her. She closes her eyes, visibly annoyed, silencing both Yalena and Kendry.

She exhales slowly. “I’m going to see if Jaq is awake.”

Rising, she bends down to give her mother a kiss on the cheek, and Kendry a peck on the lips. When she walks away, she can overhear Kendry making quick and charming amends. “Forgive my temper, Yalena…” “Oh, darling Kendry, don’t give it a moment’s worry…”

***

Fortunately for her, she can rely on the fact that Yalena is truly enamored with Kendry, and though she can more than guess her wife-to-be’s opinion on a woman who has thus far let Khlyen call all the shots, she also trusts that Kendry knows what battles are and aren’t hers.

Aneela hopes she hadn’t frightened her mother with her anger. She had forgotten, before now, that she is still very human, and Aneela is still very not. Perhaps soliciting court seats were a way of asking for a guarantee.

She enters the manor to search for Jaq. Walking down the halls has her feeling an ache. Three hundred years, she thinks. What a ridiculous number. So many memories swim in her head, she can’t even name the ones that have sunk and settled into the trenches. It’s a bit surreal, disorienting: she had always felt that this house was bigger—then again, the last time she had been here, she had been much smaller.

The halls are scrubbed clean but with still faint traces of cobwebs or moss. She remembers running down these walkways, finding a suitable hiding spot for Papa to find her. The very last time she played this game, she had truly not wanted him to.

Aneela blinks the memory away when she comes across a curtained archway she had subconsciously been looking for: her childhood bedroom.

Stepping in slowly, she clutches the fabric of her skirts, her heart breaking to find that the placid yet bright golds and beiges are now muted grays. Jaq is there, holding an old doll that, by some miracle, had survived the centuries wait.

“Hi,” she says delicately, the word still feeling rather alien in her mouth. “Have you eaten?”

Jaq looks up at her, and smiles faintly. “Yeah, a little while ago.”

She walks closer to him, and he hands her the doll. It is impossible to tell what the color of the cloth and yarn originally were. “Where did you find this little jewel?”

“I was looking around,” Jaq says, then dips his head. “I probably should’ve asked first.”

Aneela shakes her head, loops her arm around his. “Show me what else you found.”

He leads her to the polished wooden chest by the foot of the bed—not her old one, that had rotted by now—and opens it with a noisy creak.

They kneel in front of it. Jaq carefully lifts out an old leather-bound book and hands it to her. She opens it, careful not to tear the spine. “It’s a sketchbook, I think,” he says. “You used to draw?”

The ink and smudged graphite of poorly rendered trees and animals litter the pages. Aneela cannot recall these at all, but there’s no question that she had drawn them. One page contains a tiny handprint, accompanied by a larger one. It is signed _Neela-la and Mama_.

Neela-la. Gods.

He continues to dig and unearths some game things: jacks, rubber balls, spinning tops.

“How old were you when you left?”

Aneela stares down at the collection of items, absently strokes the wooly curls at the back of Jaq’s neck. “About eight, I think. When we left to Arkyn.”

The sadness that has lived inside her ribs blooms again, though much more quietly. The wave of it is broken when Jaq smiles, fiddling with the stuffing of the doll that he has picked up again. “I think you and Mom wouldn’t have been friends as kids.”

Aneela laughs. “What a thing to think about.”

He looks up at her again, new questions bubbling in his chest. “What’s it like to know so much? I mean I’ve only been here a few months, and there are how many of those in a year? And you lived three hundred of them?”

Aneela shifts position on the carpets to cross her legs with each other. His questions remind her, very warmly, of Yala as a child.

“Well,” she considers. “It’s like having the whole ocean in your head. There are some things that are always near the surface, then there is knowledge that dwells deep beneath. Some sink and rise with the seasons. Some things are peaceful. And then some things bite. A bit chaotic, if you don’t have something that keeps you afloat.”

Jaq stares off and thinks about it. She thinks perhaps she may have overdone it, but the half-formed metaphor really is only just the surface.

“Damn,” he says.

“What is it like to be you, Jaq?” she finds herself asking. She playfully taps his forehead with an index finger. “What lakes and oceans have you nurtured?”

“Well I don’t think it’s an ocean,” he says. He pauses, and then leans forward to retrieve colored graphite from the chest. He takes Aneela’s sketchbook and delicately opens it to the last page, a blank one.

He draws a line, a little flowy but clearly going in one direction. “That’s what it feels like to be me, normally.”

“A river.”

“Yeah. And then… when I See things…”

The line takes a turn, and he returns to the point of divergence to draw another path, and then another, until it looks like tree roots. Then he draws a cloud around them.

“It’s like that.”

“The future and its many streams,” Aneela observes, taken with his imagery.

“But it’s not part of the river. Not yet.”

Aneela looks up at him, and grins up to her eyes. “You’re very clever, Jaq.”

He shrugs, shy, and smiles. “I have another question.”

“Yes?”

“I mean, if you remember… What it’s like to be a kid?”

“You’re still one, Jaq, you tell me.”

“No, I mean. A small one. For longer. You know? Like a baby and then a bigger baby.”

Aneela leans back on her hands, ponders. She thinks maybe Kendry is the better parent for this conversation.

“It’s not usual that humans remember being that young, I think. You can’t talk, walk, often have to be held.” She bumps her shoulder to his. “Do we need to hold you more to make up for the lost time?”

Jaq laughs with one exhale through his teeth. “No. It’s fine.”

“Just say the word, you know.”

“You’re embarrassing me.”

Aneela beams knowingly. “How? There’s no one else here.”

And then, without warning, his smiles become a painful wince. He brings a hand to grasp the side of his head.

“Jaq?” Aneela immediately reaches for him, taking his other hand.

For a moment it seems that he’ll squirm and resist, but then he calms. Aneela inspects every part of his face.

“Was it your Sight again?”

He nods, looking like he might be sick. “Yeah. But I think I’m fine now.”

“You look nauseous. Let’s get you something hot to drink.”

Aneela rises and hoists him up, arm around his back. She takes him to the kitchen and orders a servant to bring water for the kettle (from the _good_ well, if he knew what was good for him.)

Papa enters the room, still dressed in his meeting attire. His expression goes from easygoing to concerned when he sees Jaq sitting at the island, holding his head with his face scrunched up in discomfort as he cradles the hot tea.

“I hope you haven’t been served water from the bad well.”

“Jaq is experiencing some turbulence with his Sight,” Aneela clarifies.

“Ah,” he says, approaching the island counters. “Do you remember what we used to do when you were young, with your dizzy spells?”

The corner of Aneela’s mouth tugs upward as the memory is fished out of the deep. The nostalgia of it obscures whatever feeling she had towards him when he was simultaneously absent and present this afternoon.

“I do, yes.”

“What did you used to do?” Jaq asks, his desperation for a solution showing.

“Okay, first…”

He tells Jaq to sit upright, and imagine that he’s a scarecrow. Then he tells him to inhale and exhale, slowly, to the beat of his counting. This used to work on Aneela when she wanted to stop crying but couldn’t, too. By the time Papa gets to fifteen or sixteen, Jaq is present and alert.

“Are you good now?” Aneela asks, and Jaq nods, grateful.

“Yeah.”

She fluffs the top of his hair with her fingertips, pushing them back into place. “You should find your mother. You haven’t seen her all day.”

Jaq nods again, slips off the stool and exits, leaving Aneela alone with Khlyen. She takes the unfinished mug and drinks it for herself.

“You handled that well,” she says. “Thank you, Papa.”

He tilts his head, pouring himself a cup from the pot. “You say that like you expected something different.”

“You do have quite a history for those in your care.”

He looks at her, quietly wounded, beseeching. “Aneela…”

She shakes her head, exhales. “It was unwise of you to leave Mama to do your negotiating earlier today, you know,” Aneela says. “Kendry wasn’t pleased.”

“Forgive me,” he says earnestly, softly. She looks at him directly, then. He always had such heartbreaking eyes. “I just want nothing more than to be here for you, Aneela. That’s all.”

His voice is like a warm blanket tucking her in for sleep, and she allows herself just one moment of laying her head on his shoulder.

***

“You’re not going to like what I’m about to propose,” Aneela says quietly as she fastens the tube to the back of Kendry’s neck.

She smirks over her shoulder, coyly exposed as she loosens her robe further down to her elbows. “You’re right, I’m not into sex while under your parents’ roof. I’m not a teenager.”

Aneela shakes her head, smiling. Kendry just never stops. “That’s not what I was going to suggest.”

She turns around for Kendry to fasten her own tube, and then gets the machine going. Aneela moves to sit in front of Kendry on the bed, taking her hands.

“Hear me out.”

The flirting impulse is visibly put aside. “Okay.”

She looks down at Kendry’s hands. “It would only be a gesture, but an important one for me to make, I think. Putting Papa in the court.”

Looking up, she expects to see Kendry nettled, but her expression is patient and waiting instead.

“And Yalena, too?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” Kendry thinks for a moment, still no knit on her brow. “You don’t think Khlyen’s seat would be cause for conflict with Yala and D’avin? You understand that this opens the risk of nullifying our union, as per the Pact.”

“Yes, I know.” Aneela exhales through her nose slowly, looking back down. Kendry leans forward so their foreheads meet, and Aneela closes her eyes at the warmth of her skin.

“And so?”

Aneela lowers her voice back to a whisper. “I don’t want to be a monster to them, either. I want to be the daughter they couldn’t get to have.”

Kendry listens silently.

“We have that chance now. I don’t want them to fear me. Not anymore.”

“Perhaps they should,” Kendry replies, smirk evident in her voice. “You’re about to be Queen of the Universe.”

She feels Kendry shift her head as she laces their fingers so that their palms are pressed together in an ancient Qreshi kiss—very old school, Aneela notes, and she can’t help but smile. Aneela opens her eyes to see Kendry staring at her mouth, and so she kisses her, slowly and firmly.

Perhaps it unfolds a little too passionately, especially after the joke Kendry had made earlier, but Aneela doesn’t mind. No matter which way she aches for various kinds of love, at the end of it will always be Delle Seyah Kendry.

* * *

_2.22.1063 — Ancestral Hall._

If you had told Dutch just one year ago that she’d make regular trips to Medidas City to act as the Quad’s RAC head representative, Pree’s gubernatorial advisor, diplomat for Westerlieth and Qresh, _and_ Delle Seyah’s armpiece, she’d have shot you on the spot. Twice if you told her this would all be willing and not a product of Kendry’s various blackmail. Thrice if you said, hey, at least her resume would be sparkling after a couple of years.

Gods. She misses Johnny. He would drag her to shit for this, and he would be right to.

Still, Dutch can’t deny that she is pretty damn good at all of these things, arm candy included, and if she _has_ to milk her now indissoluble connections to help the Quad last more than just an extra 120 years, then, well. What is she to do. Plus, it lines her pockets with a considerable amount of joy—maybe she can get herself a proper pottery wheel.

She leans against the wall and watches everyone mingle post-council meeting, swishing a flute of champagne. Gaining Qreshi influence or no, she could never be part of whatever sickly sweet conniving earlobe fondling mess that is the Nine (Ten, Eleven, what _ever_ ), and she finds everything about them—the polite underhanded jabs, the pretense under glasses clinking, too-high frilly laughter bouncing off the tacky walls lined with antiques—exhausting.

Aneela stands beside her with her shoulder against the wall watching her line of sight, and Dutch appreciates the comfort of her company. She would have never taken Aneela for a wallflower type, but she guesses that having been removed from Qreshi social norms—and social norms in general, for that matter—makes these insipid gatherings just as unbearable for her as it does for Dutch.

“I knew you were charismatic, Yala, but I will say I didn’t expect you to reach these lowly statesfolk so effectively,” Aneela comments, holding her flute much more delicately than Dutch is. Her chin is tipped proudly at her. “A unanimous approval for all twelve Westerleith proposals. Kendry was right about you.”

Dutch huffs a laugh. “Yeah, I’m a classic pearl hiding in the muck.”

She takes an unceremonious sip of champagne, and earns a brief stare from Seyon Trus. He already knows from experience that Dutch is a force to be reckoned with.

“Still. It does help that I’m backed by a certain untouchable family line. Qreshi politics is certainly… something.”

She watches Delle Seyah sweet-talk one of the women serving her wine. Dutch flits her eyes around all the hands in her vicinity, monitors for twitches in brows or mouths or tensed shoulders. She makes a mental note of where Louella is, because for certain she still wants Kendry dead. Flexing her statescraft muscles aside, Dutch is here because she’s aware that they’re not completely so untouchable yet (if the vague squint-and-you’ll-see-it shadows of hickeys are any fucking indication… ugh _Delle Seyah_ ). And it isn’t like they can keep relying on Jaq’s Sight for that. Effectively an oracle or no, he’s still a kid.

She looks askance, spotting him walk through a corridor in cospiratorial conversation with Liam’s daughter, Xyah, and one of the Derrish children. He fits in well here, has earned “cool kid” status amongst the royal children of Qresh, whatever the hells _that_ entails. It truly has befuddled everyone observing.

“Is there a reason why Jaq didn’t sit in?” Dutch asks as he comes to her mind. “I thought you two liked the idea of him learning ‘hands-on.’”

Aneela takes a moment, fidgets with the purple embellishments on her gold sash as she watches everyone. “It’s not wise to show all your cards at once,” she replies. “As Kendry keeps telling me.”

Dutch senses something underneath Aneela’s answer, but decides there is a reason why it is left unsaid in the presence of The Company.

Aneela shakes her head quickly and exhales, and turns her head to regard Dutch.

“I hope you aren’t upset with me for giving Papa a seat in the Pact.”

Dutch takes another swig, as if she were drinking hokk. Aneela’s looks at her patiently.

“I’m not,” Dutch says, and it’s mostly the truth. “It’s actually very smart. Maybe the only way he’ll do right by you is to be legally obligated.”

The words visibly shift Aneela, like she’s taking a step back from something. “I love our father, Yala, but I’m not a fool. I know how to keep him at arm’s length.”

“Do you?” asks Dutch earnestly. “Khlyen is like, having a pair of earphones in your pocket. It all gets tangled up eventually.”

Aneela’s brow creases. “I… cannot relate to that.”

Delle Seyah saunters across the room to them, her purple sash billowing behind her and perhaps intentionally revealing the gold underside. She slides an arm around Aneela’s waist like a ship docking, the intimacy of it making Dutch suddenly shy.

She doesn’t get ignored, however, as is Kendry’s way. “Yalena Yardeen Junior, you are all the talk amongst the Eleven,” she says with a twinkle, and the new addition to her name makes Dutch roll her eyes. “I’ve had to field seven offers for your hand in marriage in the last half hour.”

“Hm. You’d hate sharing me,” she replies flatly. Aneela stifles a laugh.

“Maybe so.” Kendry twiddles with the end of a braid hanging off Dutch’s shoulder.

Then she shifts slightly, opening up their triangle to avoid having her back completely turned to the room.

“Lisette is a servant of Land Rinn,” she says, her chin pointing in her direction. “Says we may need to keep an eye on their new patriarch. He doesn’t seem to be our number one fan. Claims we’re spoiling all of The Company’s fruits.”

“I still don’t see why I can’t just kill them all,” Aneela murmurs.

Delle Seyah absently smiles, unconcerned. “Stop passing doodles to Jaq during my treasury lessons and then we’ll talk.”

Seyah Hyponia approaches their corner amiably. “Ah, the lovebirds. When’s the wedding, Seyah Kendry? Will you be marrying this one too?”

Hyponia looks at Dutch up and down salaciously, and she knows immediately to remove herself from this one from the way Kendry’s posture straightens with restrained bloodlust.

“I’m going to check on Mr. Popular now,” she says, lifting her weight off the wall with a grunt, depositing her empty flute at the nearest bar.

She walks purposefully with her hands folded behind her back, discreetly surveying the room, staircase, and hallways. Turning a corner where she last saw Jaq, she bumps into Xyah.

“Whoa, careful,” she says, hands held out as Xyah’s face blanches for a moment. “Relax, I’m the other one.”

“It’s Jaq,” Xyah whispers, grabbing Dutch by the hand and leading her down the hallway. “Come quick.”

She’s led to one of the entertainment rooms. The Derrish kid—whose mouth is bright pink? Nevermind—is pressed tight against the wall in fear; the holo-chess table flickers forlornly on its side. And then she sees Jaq, leaning his head atop the balustrade of the balcony, shoulders quivering, hands nested in his hair.

“Jaq,” Dutch gasps, then wills the tightening of her throat to loosen into something calmer.

“I didn’t do anything,” Derrish says, voice way too whimpery for someone his age. “We were playing chess—and yes, I may have booby-trapped one of the tiles, but I—”

“Shush,” Dutch hisses impatiently. “Just get out of here— _calmly_ —and I’ll sort you out if I need to.”

Xyah and Derrish obey, scurrying out the room.

“Jaq, hey,” Dutch says gently, reaching out a hand. Before she can touch him, he turns around abruptly and makes a shove at her, a scowl on his face.

She catches his wrists and bends his arms against his body, firm but careful not to hurt him. “ _Jaq_.”

The blankness in his face flares panic in her lungs, and she thinks for a second of the nightmare that was D’avin and Dr. Jaeger. But soon something washes over him, a realization. The tension in his limbs fizzles out, and she drops his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he says, blinking something away ferociously. “I don’t feel good. We should go.”

“I’ll say.” Dutch exhales and looks behind her, seeing the hallway clear. She gives Jaq another once over, then walks with him with her arm gently placed over his shoulder. Best pretend everything is fine—eyes on Qresh are like daggers, and they love to get stabby.

They exit the hall into the main room, where the two kids are acting as natural as Qreshi youth can. Kendry and Aneela are still in their corner. Dutch makes eye-contact with both of them and tips her head toward the stairs in signal.

The suave and casual demeanors are dropped the moment they step into the sterile white of Kendry’s ship. Dutch sits Jaq down on a bench.

“What happened?” asks Aneela, kneeling beside him.

Delle Seyah stands behind Aneela with Dutch, careful not to smother him.

Jaq looks away, embarrassed. “I tried to look into Mavo’s moves while playing chess.”

“Not the best idea, given the circumstances,” Delle Seyah reprimands with crossed arms.

Dutch’s brow furrows. “What circumstances?”

“Nothing.”

“Jaq,” Aneela admonishes, though much lighter than Kendry. “Don’t lie to Yala.”

He looks down apologetically.

“My Sight’s not working properly.” He wipes something out of his eye before proceeding. “Ever since I killed the hatchling.”

“The hatchling?” Dutch mentally counts the days. “That was weeks ago.”

“I know.”

The lines on Kendry’s forehead goes deeper. “The _hatchling_ has something to do with this?”

Jaq scowls and hovers his hands over his ears, prompting Kendry to lower her voice.

“What else has been happening?” she asks.

“I had trouble seeing anything, but now it’s like I’m… someplace else. Doing other things.”

“Is that why you tried to push me?” There’s no accusatory tone in Dutch’s words, but Aneela and Kendry look at her with mild alarm in any case.

Jaq stands up abruptly, hands out between his body and all of theirs. “Don’t call Dad.”

Kendry is taken aback. “Jaq, it’s been well over ‘a few days’, I need to follow through and let him know. I actually _should have_ when we left your grandfather’s.”

“No,” Jaq counters, stepping away, agitated in a way none of them have ever seen him before. “Cause then you’ll bring me to Arkyn and run tests, and I don’t want to be strapped to a damn table—”

“Whoa, whoa,” Dutch cuts in before the other two can, raising a stopping hand to him. “Who said anything about that? Where is this coming from?”

“I Saw it. I don’t want it.”

“We won’t do anything that you don’t consent to,” Delle Seyah sharply affirms, “but should it come down to it, your safety overrides your preferences.”

That seems to quell Jaq. He breathes in and out, grounding himself. “I’m sorry for shouting.”

“You’re forgiven.” Delle Seyah’s gaze softens. “Go grab some food. We’ll be home soon.”

He nods and walks off, and Dutch exhales. Delle Seyah takes the seat Jaq occupied and holds Aneela’s hand.

“I’m not sure what to make of that. That child quite literally grew up on a medical table, and he doesn’t fuss when you have Zeph check on him.”

Aneela gazes off into the direction where he disappeared to, heartbreak contorting her face. “He doesn’t know what he’s seeing, but it’s making him very afraid.”

“Could it be foul play?” Dutch asks. “You said it yourself, Kendry, not everyone’s very happy with you right now. It might be,” something clots in Dutch’s throat and she wills it clear—“mind control or something.”

“Gods forbid,” Delle Seyah says quietly. “And now there’s this hatchling business to consider. We won’t know until it’s done. But we can’t wait for that, can we?” She sighs, watching Aneela and then turns back to Dutch, examining her.

“Are you okay, Yala?”

The question from Kendry momentarily surprises her. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“All right. Be a dear and get us out of here.”

Dutch nods and turns on her foot to the direction of the cockpit. “Yes, ma’am.”

***

Delle Seyah lingers with Dutch by the ship as they watch Aneela take Jaq inside the house, guards circling them protectively as they enter.

“Not that I’m trying to have a moment with you,” Dutch says, “but you’re killing this whole motherhood thing.”

Kendry smiles, brief and distracted. “Thanks, I suppose.” Then she sighs and faces her. “Tell D’avin what happened today. He’ll astral project into my dreams otherwise. But make sure he doesn’t come rampaging in the middle of the night, I _will_ shoot him.”

“You can tell him yourself. He is your co-parent, you know.”

“Yes, but he is your boything.”

Dutch rolls her eyes. “Okay. And then?”

“We make a plan. There is no blueprint for someone like Jaq. And I think in the bustle of everything else, we’ve neglected to be proactive.” Kendry stares off at the estate for a few seconds, then focuses back on her with a grin, looking her up and down. “Good job again today, Yalena. You’re proving to be an indispensable asset.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Dutch drawls with a smirk.

“Just the ones that look like you.” Kendry pecks Dutch’s cheek, half affectionate and half to annoy, before walking off. “Au revoir, Killjoy.”

* * *

_He’ll be holding a knife. No, he is. He did. Not a knife—a rod, heavy in his hands, needled at both ends. He is holding—he held—he will hold—_

_The saturation of the world will dull, the air around him tightening, the muscles of his chest tightening—he’ll swing. He’ll connect. He’ll push. The flesh will crunch and squelch. The light in his target’s eyes will dim, just like the rest of the world. Just like it has. Just like it did._

(No. This is not the river we flow into. It shouldn’t be what he Sees now, after all this time, and yet—)

_Yala will go first. Then his father. Then his uncle. Then Pip, then Zephyr, then Pree, then the rest—and then his grandfather. His grandmother, who stayed asleep only to be fallen by this. Aneela. Sweet, lonely, mad Aneela._

_Then Delle Seyah. Won’t it be poetic, a whisper says, that you’ll bore into the head of the mother who bore you. Won’t it be righteous, when she looks into your eyes and does not see you but_ me _—_

(No)

_The green and the red will stain his hands. He won’t feel a thing. There is no he. Only I. This is not a choice. This is_ me _, you were always meant to be_ me _—_

(No)

_Hybrid child, you are a vessel. You will kill, you will prepare, you will bring the end of the world—_

Jaq awakens.

He remains awake until dawn. His pulse doesn’t steady until he goes to the roof where his mother is already stretching with the sun, and falls asleep curled up on the chaise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided on timeline and dates with the help of [mossologist's beautifully elaborate killjoys timeline](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15946022/chapters/37185188). Just for the sake of my brain, I also decided that there are 35 days (5 weeks) per month. It's not that important lmao.
> 
> “Mom” for Kendry and “Ma” for Aneela is absolutely me borrowing from Henry Swan-Mills (OUAT) and his two moms. Both of them being Mom is great for the screen, not so much for writing lmao. Dutch just constitutes her own familial title—no real word in the English lexicon to describe your memory-aunt-sister-mom, sadly.
> 
> Also, Jaq describing the way his psychic powers work was definitely entirely inspired by Garnet from Steven Universe’s own explanation of her future vision. A tip of the hat to kshaar for that connection.
> 
> ALSO I refuse to believe that 5x10 took place partially on Land Kin Rit? Who the fuck was keeping that place clean for 250 years? You’re telling me no one fought over that piece of freebie land? Hello??? Anyways… yeah lmfao


	3. DELTA

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content Warnings: derealization, recreational drug use, discussions of child abuse, attempted assassination, blood mentions**

_2.23.1063 — Shell Seyah._

With the lights set to medium intensity and the room locked and soundproofed for extra security, the meeting begins. Pippin’s holo form stands at the podium, clears his throat, and adjusts his clip-on tie.

“Welcome, folks, to the third official Parent Council for the man himself, Jaq.” He opens his arms wide and addresses the four people sat in a circle around him, who are visibly not in the dress code he had suggested last meeting. Delle Seyah is in yoga pants, for starters. “I’m Pippin, your moderator.”

“ _And I’m Shell Seyah,_ ” the ship sounds. The large screen behind Pippin flashes on to display a running log of the conversation. _“Your transcriber. Remember: talk shit, get hit._ ”

“Fucking gods,” D’avin mutters under his breath. Shell Seyah types it under his name with integrity.

“As a reminder,” Pip resumes, “the Council Agreements are as follows. One mic, one voice; listen to understand, not to respond—”

“Motion to kill Pippin,” Kendry interrupts flatly with an impatient sway of her crossed leg.

“Seconded,” Aneela says.

“ _Vetoed_ ,” Dutch and D’avin say.

“ _One_ mic, guys,” Pippin reminds. “You’re adults, come on.”

Aneela turns her head to Kendry. “Remind me why he is here.”

“Pip was Jaq’s first word,” Dutch answers.

Pippin coughs nervously, in a way that conveys that he is glad he is here on holo and not in person. “So, opening topic?”

Dutch is the first to respond. “What’s going on with Jaq.”

“Seconded,” say the other three, simultaneously.

“Let’s start with Delle Seyah.”

Kendry takes a deep breath, uncrosses her legs. “Well, two days after returning from spending time with Yala and D’avin, Jaq was acting… not himself. Broodier, I would say. He told me then that he was having peculiar visions he couldn’t explain.”

D’avin raises a hooked index finger, and Pippin nods to him. “And why was I the last to know all this?”

Kendry rolls her eyes. “I am getting to that, Jaqobis. I told Jaq that I’d let Aneela know, but if it persisted I would bring it up with you and Dutch.”

Aneela does not bother with the hand signals, as she usually never has. “During our visit to Land Kin Rit, he had a mild episode. He was fine in the end, but it was troubling.”

The circle looks to Dutch. “The latest happened in Medidas City. Jaq was hanging around some kids and one of them brought me to him. He was… disoriented, tried to push me. That was when he told the three of us that this had been happening since the hatchling incident two weeks ago.”

“The last time we spoke he asked me what we did with the body,” D’av shares. “We didn’t have time to do anything but toss it in the incinerator. He didn’t seem to have too many feelings about that… but it was clearly on his mind. Does anyone know what he sees?”

“He said sometimes it feels like he’s in another place,” Dutch says. “But otherwise, no.”

Kendry and Aneela likewise shake their heads.

Turning to face Shell Seyah’s screen, Pip scans the running log. “So Jaq slam dunked on a hatchling two weeks ago, which is when his weird visions have started, going from bad vibes to some odd behavior. Consensus?”

“Aye,” say all.

“Next point of discussion.”

Kendry holds up a pointed finger to answer. “Next steps. We need to find out what’s causing this.”

Shell Seyah changes the header of the log from _NAME THE PROBLEM_ to _GAME PLAN_.

“Ideas?” she asks.

“Could be directly related to the hatchling,” Dutch offers. “I’ll talk to The Lady, if that’s something we can agree I should do.”

“And if that’s a dead end?” D’avin asks, with a hooked finger.

“We need to know what he’s seeing,” Aneela answers, once again ignoring signal etiquette. “Jaq said he foresaw us taking him to Arkyn to be tested. He was very resistant to the idea.”

“Your research was what made Jaq possible,” Dutch points out. “Maybe it needs to be done anyway.”

“I could, but I will need help.” Aneela looks at Dutch tentatively, a finger stilled atop her chin in thought. Then she folds her hands stiffly on her lap. “I understand that this may be a contentious proposal. But all my work was built off from what my father already did, so…”

“Vetoed,” D’avin replies with immediacy.

Dutch and Kendry sit in silence.

“Hello? No, right?”

“I’m concerned we may hurt Jaq by doing this,” Kendry says.

“Seconded.”

“That wasn’t a motion.”

“Still.”

Aneela shakes her head. “We hurt Jaq if we do nothing. And you said yourself, Kendry, that his safety takes precedence over his preferences.”

“But with _Khylen_?” D’avin says, incredulous. “You’re serious?”

“He does have a seat with the Knights now,” Dutch murmurs.

His eyes widen. “He _what_?”

“Soooo correct me if I’m wrong,” Pip intervenes with clasped hands. “But this has quickly become a very different kind of Parent Council.”

“Shut up, Pippin.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Aneela,” Dutch says with a gentleness. “I’d prefer to take him to Zeph. But if you really need to consult him before we do that, then that’s up to you.”

Aneela is silent for a moment, thinking as she stares off at Shell Seyah’s transcript. “Okay. He will not be there, but I will provide Zephyr with his research.”

“Okay. Are we good to go with this plan?” Dutch asks the circle.

“Approved,” says Kendry.

“Approved,” echoes Aneela.

They all look to D’avin, and he sighs. “Approved.”

Shell Seyah makes a pleasant ding. “ _The approved action items will be forwarded to your PDDs.”_

“Man,” Pip exhales reverently. “You guys are naturals at this. Truly democratizing the parenting process.”

“Shut the _fuck_ _up_ , Pip.”

* * *

_2.24.1063 — Westerleith._

A family trip to oversee the refugee cities is the pretense under which they make their way to Leith. They arrive at Zeph’s shiny new Aneela-favoritism-funded laboratory, as Mom likes to call it. It’s really a decommissioned hullen ship rested peacefully on the outskirts of Westerlyn residential squares, and Jaq would think it was really cool if he weren’t being taken there to get hooked up to its machines.

He tries not to feel resentment. The anxiety _is_ admittedly out of nowhere, but that bothers him—when does he get old enough to know himself like that? To know oceans like Aneela, to feel full and fine like Delle Seyah?

Zeph fastens a scanner around Jaq’s head, fixes an electrode at each side of his temple, and clips a pulse oximeter to his index finger.

“Will this take long?” he asks, sat upright on the table. “Will it hurt?”

“It won’t, but any time you want out, just say so,” Zeph assures.

“Just take a deep breath,” D’avin says.

He sits still as Zeph takes a blood sample for a rudimentary toxicology, to make sure he wasn’t dosed any weird psychoactives, whatever that means. He winces, watching the red of his blood run through the tubes.

Eventually, it becomes less of a whole ordeal and something close to regular, like it’s just one of those check-ups Zeph normally does with way less equipment, and just that everyone also happens to be here. Zeph and Ma talk amongst themselves in front of the computers, their jargon beyond him. Dutch and Dad talk about RAC business, occasionally cracking a few jokes with Jaq about when they’ll play their next round of VR games. Mom is on her PDD grilling Uncle Liam over some legislation he approved while she was still officially dead and will have to fix within the next few weeks.

The normality of it ends when there’s a series of beeps coming from the computers, and Zeph calls for everyone’s attention.

“We found something,” she states, and Jaq wills up the courage to read their faces. Serious, a touch of alarm.

They all reconvene around the lab station. Zeph points to one of the many screens projected on the vast white wall, which present two different cross-wise views of Jaq’s brain. Clusters light up with reds, blues, and greens, and next to that screen is a collection of lines going up and down in a dizzying track.

“This is Jaq’s brain activity normally. First from when he was born, and then, you know, when he aged up twice Sims style in a period of five hours.”

Zeph flicks her thumb over the remote wheel, and the screens switch. There are more colors and lights speckling the medial display of his brain.

“This is Jaq’s activity when he’s having a normal vision, also collected from way back when. Not normal for any _human_ brain, but seems to be standard for Jaq. He might have an extra section of cortex that we don’t have? Anyway.”

She flicks the remote wheel again.

“This… is what’s showing up now. Major hyper-activity in his occipital lobe and sensory-motor strips. His amygdala doesn’t look too happy, either. All this coupled with under-activity in the frontal lobes.”

Deep reds practically engulf parts of his brain, and the lines of the graph peak and trough aggressively. Jaq stares up at the screens with a heaviness.

“Does that hurt you?” Dad asks, and something about the question makes another ache light up in his head.

“It doesn’t feel great,” Jaq replies.

Zeph clears her throat again. “Thanks to uh, Mr. Kin Rit’s hullen brain studies, I can take the activity occurring in your visual and motor cortices and your hippocampus to reconstruct what you’ve been seeing on the screen. It’s not going to be perfect, but, we can give that a shot if that’s okay.”

She’s looking at all four of his parents, but he answers before they can say anything. If any of them look nervously at each other, he elects to ignore it.

“It’s okay with me.”

Zeph nods. She clicks around and types something on the keyboard, and then the screen turns to black. Then scratchy blotches of gray prickled with stars emerge from the edges, the way standing up too quickly can sometimes do. Images flash, a little too grainy and unstable, showing impressions of the hatchling. It’s a memory, Jaq can tell, from the way he can feel in his mind the hilt of his blades pressing into the abdomen.

Seconds pass, and there comes other bursts, of outlines and shapes, blurred movements. None of them seem to make any sense, and even when he tries to find any sign of recognition on everyone else, there aren’t any. It’s almost as if an idea was churned over and over again until all that was left was a mutated rumor, a broken concept.

“I hear things, too,” Jaq says, when he notices that the clips of his brainfog are completely silent. “Weird things.”

“Don’t have the tech to recreate that,” Zeph replies apologetically.

There’s silence as everyone tries to scrutinize what little the scanner is giving them, and Jaq begins to feel hopeless.

Then the realization comes to him, like catching something thrown at him clean with both hands. It’s something they’d never ask him to do himself; it is up to him to offer it.

“I need to trigger more visions.” He grows anxious as he says it, the feeling akin to looking down the cliff before jumping.

“Are you sure?” D’avin asks. “You might get hurt.”

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

Dutch’s shoulders raise as she inhales. “Don’t go too hard, okay, kid?”

He breathes out, and nods. He closes his eyes.

Nothing changes on the screen, for a moment, but then it shows Jaq’s hand, bloodied and greened, gripping a dreadnought. Jaq gasps and it quickly changes—running through a forest, falling.

Then, flashing in and out—lips moving, snarling. The identity is barely discernible, but the ostensibly feminine shape and its white pallor draws a sharp inhale from everyone who recognizes her, all but Delle Seyah and Zeph. Jaq tries to step back but now that he’s looking down, he goes forward, falls.

“Jaq? Jaq, slow down.”

He barely hears it. He had brought the cube to The Lady like he had planned to, but he never escaped the cuffs that held him to the operating table. He never saved his dad; he never got hit with the bullet that Ma would feel in her chest all the way from Qresh. Instead he is hauled to the chamber where fumes would suffocate him until another set of eyes were in his head, another voice, another heartbeat.

It’s like the fog that shrouded the meaning of his nightmare is blown away by a hurricane, and he hits the rocks at the bottom of the cliff with such clarity that he can’t stop himself from seeing more—seeing in fast flashes each person he kills, each hatchling that grows and devours and dominates. He sees and hears it so clearly that he pays no heed to the way his heart monitor beeps with urgency, to the rise in everyone’s voices.

“That’s _enough._ ” Delle Seyah’s voice cuts through the turbulence. Everything is now still and quiet, like he had missed the entire landing.

When he opens his eyes, Aneela’s hands are clutched around his tightened fist. Delle Seyah and D’avin make a motion to approach him.

“Stop. I’m fine,” he says. “It’s fine. It helped. I could see it.”

“You didn’t need to push yourself,” D’avin says, and something flickers in Jaq’s ribs.

“Yeah I did,” he counters, feeling the same kind of frustration when his dad tried to keep him from stopping The Lady. “I know what it is now. It’s not the future, but it’s… it’s—” he fumbles for the words, grows irritated.

“An alternate timeline,” Zeph says. “A counter-history.”

Dutch gives a shaky exhale, her entire demeanor strained like a rubber band stretched to its limits. Jaq’s mind returns to the way she held her breath when he had shoved at her at Medidas.

“The world if The Lady had won.”

An understanding begins to wash over Delle Seyah’s face. He thinks she might name it, but instead she turns to address the rest of the room. “We’ve finished what we came here to do. It’s time to get going.”

Her politician’s nod signals everyone to begin moving. Jaq edges off the table and is grateful to feel something solid beneath his feet. D’av pats Jaq’s back in comfort; Aneela thanks Zeph behind the computers. His other mom has pulled Dutch aside to talk, something about visiting The Lady.

The calm is a pretense. They’re not in charge. Jaq sees it now, and it creates a dreadful buzz in his head. They’re not as in charge as they think they are, and their shielding will be how he hurts them in the end. He doesn’t want it. He wants them safe. A voice plays in his memory. _Sometimes you need to make the most difficult choices on your own, for their sake._ Jaq ruminates over the vision, again and again.

* * *

By the time they board the ship to head back to Qresh, it’s already well past Jaq’s usual eat-everything-on-sight hours. D’av often gets an earful from Delle Seyah about their son’s abysmal sleeping patterns, something to the tune of: of course he’s hungry all the time he always misses breakfast, you and your Jaqobis genes; to which he can only reply with, ma’am, do you know how teenager brains even work? The answer is usually a no, whether or not by her own admission.

But this time Jaq sits quietly at the table with his PDD in front of him, watching a…? _Jak joke? Joy jok?_ Whatever kids these days are doing—and only occasionally taking a peanut from the bowl in front of him to eat.

“How are you feeling?” he hears Delle Seyah ask him from where she leans on the counter, her voice a jarring interminglement with Shell Seyah’s as she badgers him over the tea brew he’s trying to make. _You’re doing it wrong. Those leaves don’t go together. Stop trying to kill everyone on this ship._

“I told you that I’m fine.”

D’av looks over his shoulders. There’s a hidden sharpness to Jaq’s voice, but the way a cub might try to imitate its mother’s growl. Delle Seyah raises her eyebrows, not affronted in any way but surprised.

“You don’t seem fine,” he says.

Delle Seyah shakes her head, folds her arms and looks down impatiently. “When you get home, you should eat something better and take a rest. You must be worn out from all the—”

“Can you all just worry about yourselves for once?”

Delle Seyah raises her chin and has that blank look that immediately disarms Jaq into silence. The escalation brings D’av to turn around fully, crossing his arms as he prepares to formulate some Dad brand respect-your-mother reply.

“Hey,” exclaims Dutch defensively, coming in early enough to hear the exchange and beating him to the punch. Aneela follows behind her. “You do not talk to your mother like that.”

Jaq rises from the table, not without grabbing the bowl of peanuts, and walks briskly past Dutch and Aneela out into the hallway.

“Leave him be,” Delle Seyah says when Dutch makes a motion to stop him. “It’s water off a duck’s back.”

Dutch clicks her teeth. “Still.”

D’av sighs, hands Delle Seyah his brew attempt; she takes a sip and gives it back with a wince, and he deflates.

“What’s the plan with The Lady?” he asks.

“Aneela’s coming with me,” Dutch replies.

“It may be fruitful. Two heads are better than one, as they say.” Aneela makes her way to Delle Seyah’s side, lifting her hand primly. “You stay with Jaq. You may, too, if you so desire,” she says tossing D’avin a considering glance.

He knows intellectually that he shouldn’t need permission to supervise his own kid, but from Aneela it humbles him nonetheless.

“Consider my schedule cleared,” he says, perhaps a little too valiantly, earning a fond eyeroll from Dutch.

“Great, so now I have two Jaqobis to babysit,” Delle Seyah murmurs before giving Aneela a smooch. “Have fun.”

The memory twins leave with Shell Seyah after dropping the three of them off at the Kendry Estate. Jaq heads straight to his room without paying them any attention, and while Delle Seyah is happy to let him alone, D’av wishes that Jaq would at least come talk to him. He could express as much, but perhaps she’d laugh at him and say oh so it’s _me_ who doesn’t know how teenagers work?

His silent brooding is still probably a little too loud for her taste. She gives him an exasperated look, calls a servant to fetch him indoor shoes, and leads him into her office.

It would be weird, the two of them hanging out, if they hadn’t already started making it something of a habit. Aneela and Dutch will occasionally take a trip together with Jaq to do some bonding, leaving him with the limited choices of spending the time with RAC bros or third-wheeling Zeph and Pip. At least with Delle Seyah, she gets him the good alcohol. Perhaps it’s not always the best trade-off, however: last time, Johnny had called, started gushing about his latest adventure and some girl he met, and Delle Seyah couldn’t help herself—told Johnny to think really hard before he brings a girlfriend back to the Quad, she might stab that one, too. Oh, he was _pissed_.

Still. Despite his little brother’s protests, they are still, weirdly, good friends. He thinks. She does call him by his name now.

“Put your feet up on my couch and I’ll cut them off,” she says flatly.

D’av knows by now that there’s nothing backing the threat, and does so anyway, laying his PDD on the coffee table and resting his head on an arm. She sighs, and digs around the drawers of her desk located by the wall behind the couch.

He looks around the office, taking in the ornate wallpaper and shelves full of books that, well, look old as fuck. Really hearkens back to the Ancient Days, with the only evidence of modernity sitting on top of her mahogany desk.

The clock on the wall reads a couple of hours past noon, which he has to squint at for the precise minute. Analogue. Pretentious.

“Doesn’t Jaq usually have one of your historical erasure lessons soon?”

“Yes,” she replies distractedly, either not processing his wording or choosing to ignore them. He hears her push clutter around her desk drawer until she breaths a victorious hum. “But I don’t think he’s in the learning mindset today. Catch.”

An aluminum box goes flying over the couch back, which he grabs with both hands. He clicks his teeth. A little harder and she would’ve cracked her own glass table.

He opens it, and seeing its contents lifts his head to look at her, eyes wide and incredulous. “Qush?!”

Delle Seyah walks toward the arm chair adjacent to him, lighter in hand and ashtray in the other. Her grin is smug. “Only the best. Don’t I treat you well, Killjoy?”

He shakes his head, sitting up. “ _Glass joints_. You Qreshi bastards.”

Out of surprisingly present host courtesy, she lets him have the first few puffs, reminding him to wave the flame over the mouthpiece before handing it to her. She leans back, tucking her feet underneath her legs up on the chair, the skirt of her dress cascading off the edge. He scoffs at her when she exhales perfect rings. Fucking show off.

The Qush settles in softly, quickly, just as he remembers a question he had meant to ask. He tilts his head up, and she looks at him expectantly.

“So when were you going to tell me that you added Khlyen to the Pact?”

Delle Seyah flicks the lighter on and inhales, passes the glass joint back to him. “It’s just a trial run. It’s not official.”

He taps the glass on the ashtray resting on the table. It doesn’t really do much to palliate him, and she can see it on his brow, gives him that annoyed territorial glare she has on when he dares to weigh in on Qreshi traditions.

“Even then,” he says after inhaling from the joint. “This puts your marriage at risk, if he tries anything.”

“Preaching to the choir, Jaqobis.” She puts up a polite hand when he offers the Qush back to her, and he holds onto it. “There is a reason why no one on Qresh has been able to pull off a successful Perpetuum marriage for hundreds of years.”

D’av scoffs. “You all can’t help but kill each other?”

“Precisely.” She props her head up on the armrest of the chair. “Someone kills somebody over a spot in the court or over the union and it never can come to fruition. Or the Pact nullifies because someone breaks the alliance. Or someone cheats, wants to call it off. Ten-years don’t apply— the marriage is binding for life. Or, attempts to kill their spouse, which is also punishable by death, and the whole thing falls apart. Great power, great responsibility, all that bullshit.”

As she says it, her face grows more and more contemplative, rescinding the look of annoyance she had given him. He follows the trail: lifelong for her and Aneela will literally mean _forever_ , and they will inherit the mutual allyship of every one of their court’s descendants, should they have any. Something can go so wrong so quickly and so early.

“So when does this trial end?”

“Whenever I’m fully hullen again,” Kendry sighs. “Then we decide for certain, make a formal announcement. There’s a reason why you all have been sworn to secrecy. No one else on Qresh has any knowledge that we’re invoking this, besides my family and Aneela’s, of course. Otherwise you’d perhaps find my head on a pike somewhere on Land Simms.”

The image draws out a wince. “Glad I’m not very talkative with most Qreshis.” He takes one last him before setting the joint back on the coffee table, then leans back.

“You know,” he begins, feeling the Qush string it out of him. “I had a terrible father, too. I get how it is when you hope they’ll be better, but then never are.”

Delle Seyah scoffs, which to be fair, he should have seen coming. “Oh, don’t act like that. Like you’re the only one here that understands that.”

It piques his interest; he raises an eyebrow, eager for some forbidden Kendry lore. For someone so extra she is also rather mysterious. “Care to share with the class?”

She rolls her eyes. “Mine tried to marry me off for an alliance. To some rotten old Seyon old enough to be his brother with a daughter that could have been my sister.” She smirks, points across the office with her chin. “I pushed him off that very balcony. Might be haunted, do you want to find out?”

D’av actually barks a laugh, shakes his head. Very Delle Seyah Kendry, to casually admit to what would be a tragic past on literally anyone else and have absolutely no trauma about it.

“Nope, I am absolutely good on that.”

She reaches for the Qush and lights it up. “Uh-huh.”

Comfortable silence settles over them for a minute as she blows more sweet pungent haze into the air.

“Still,” she says, more serious now. “Aneela… her heart is so _full_. So wide. So prone to spilling, even for the likes of Khlyen. Even when she knows he can’t be trusted.”

“She’s like Dutch like that.” The way Dutch looks when she thinks he isn’t watching comes to his mind. The red box she keeps under her bed. “There are times when she misses him.”

“And yet she knows to stay away.”

They sit in a period of silence again before Delle Seyah speaks.

“You know, I can’t help but to think… I heard about that argument you had with Dutch, months ago, when she was teaching Jaq how to fight.”

“Hm. She went too far, no matter what Jaq said to you.”

“No, I know. Now, at least. Perhaps I wouldn’t have had the thought to stop her. You know I’m not averse to breaking some skin for sport. But you were right, in the forest when you told me that he doesn’t have to be like me to survive. No, I wouldn’t have stopped her, but you did. He had you.”

She looks up at him. He’d call it softness, if he didn’t know better. A crease in her brow hardens it again.

“But the one other person that Aneela should have had after Khyen was isolating her, playing scientist on his own daughter, just… decided to sleep through it all.”

D’av shakes his head, neck rolling slowly. “He’s a strategist. He made her see things his way. It’s what he does.”

She scoffs. “It would be so easy to just… do what I know how to do. Lie, manipulate, fool.”

“You _are_ the biggest snake I know.”

“Ha. Thanks… But to do that to someone I profess my love and devotion to. What would I really be after?”

“Control. Dominion over her,” D’av says clearly, staring off at the wall opposite to him. He looks at her with a fondness that is maybe Qush-facilitated. “Preaching to the choir, Seyah Kendry.”

“Good,” she punctuates with a grin. “At least I have a fucking choir.”

He motions for the joint and she places it between his fingers. After a puff, contemplation pulls his eyebrows together. “When did I ever tell you that about Jaq? What forest?”

Delle Seyah closes her eyes, nostrils flaring, as if caught red-handed. She pinches the bridge of her nose. “You didn’t. I got mixed up.”

D’avin’s confusion smooths over to delightedly smug, head tilting as he leans forward. “Did you dream of me, Delle Seyah.”

She leans in, too. “I will absolutely stab you, right here and now.”

“You legally cannot.”

Calmly, she takes the tray and blows the ashes in his face. (Then gets him a glass of water, after letting him cough up a damn lung.)

* * *

Eventually, Jaq does have a fulfilling meal, and that puts him in a mood mellow enough that he asks his father to join him and other kids outdoors to play Evil Kickball (“ _Evil_ Kickball?” “You score if you hit the pitcher.” “ _Fucking_ Qresh—”). Mostly sobered up, Delle Seyah sits at her desk with her holo screens and glasses on, reading Bea’s updates on the debtor’s colony. She’d like to give Bea a real job soon, one that will protect her from any retaliation for their stunt.

Her PDD rings, Yala’s name flashing in bright green text.

“We spoke to The Lady,” Dutch says with no greeting, clearly in one of her zones. “She says she’s got nothing to do with what’s happening with Jaq. Even if she wanted to pull anything like that, she’s still in the mirror box and also human—” She pauses to look at Kendry closely. “You wear glasses?”

“They suit her, don’t they?” Aneela’s voice is heard in the background, until she joins Dutch in the frame, looking over Dutch’s shoulder. “Hello, my love.”

Kendry attempts to contain her smile, but the lingering Qush makes her feel goopy. It’s nice, she finds herself thinking, to see them together like this. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” Aneela answers. “Their species do by design have some sort of telepathic powers. Jaq’s killing of one may have triggered something.”

“Huh. Like a poltergeist, almost.”

“How is he doing?”

Rising from her seat, she walks to the balcony window and pulls down a shutter to get a view of the sports diamond below. D’av is pitching; Jaq kicks and nearly gets him in the head, and Xyah and another boy whoop and cheer. “Better. He’s outside with D’avin, bruising the crap out of him with a ball.”

“That sounds fun,” Aneela says genuinely. Dutch nudges her with her hip in feigned disapproval.

“We’ll be back in Qresh in a bit,” Dutch says. “And then we can decide what to do.”

Kendry watches Jaq, who in the presence of his peers is no longer as ill-tempered but still carries a heaviness on his shoulders. She thinks about his brief outburst on the ship, about what was actually underneath.

“I might have a few ideas.”

* * *

_2.27.1063 — Kendry Estate._

Three days and a drafted curriculum later, Jaq starts his training. If you want us off your back, you’ll need to be equipped, Mom tells him. So let us equip you.

Having slept the melatonin supplement out of his body, Jaq goes to meet his mother on the roof where she has rolled out an extra mat next to hers. She waits, straight-backed as he removes his house shoes and takes position beside her. She attends to his posture, he mimics her warm-up stretches. Don’t just copy blindly, she says. Pay attention to how your muscles feel. You should be feeling tension here, and here. Count your breaths. Listen, the way Dutch has told you to before. No, it’s not actually echolocation, your father isn’t as well-read as his brother.

When his breath hitches and his eyes gets glassy, his mother holds him by the shoulders. Don’t move. Keep breathing. She counts out the guidepost numbers. The vision seems to pass, but it takes the wind out of him. Mom, this is pointless; Oh, no you don’t. Give me your hands, quitter. You’re no use to yourself if you give in to dread.

They sit across each other, hands folded over one another in the familiar way they used to do, when they were on the run. This isn’t so different, she says, the stakes are just a bit higher. You’ve done this before. You can do it even better.

She tells him to describe every sensation he can in specific detail. The more you have to think about it, the more you pay attention to it. The goal is to have as many tethers to the present, to _this_ world, not the hypothetical Lady’s or hatchling’s. To make sure that you can return to shore and not get lost in the riptide.

Jaq closes his eyes, takes a breath, visibly calmer now with the reframing Delle Seyah has provided.

He feels another tide coming, and this time he can pinpoint how it makes his heart race, how something floods the back of his mind in quiet terror—dread—how his mouth seems to go numb.

“I see Old Town,” he says, sounding far away to himself. “I smell… metal. Burning.”

Mom grips his hands a little firmer, and he feels it like an echo. A lone salmon jumping upstream.

“Find something that doesn’t fit.”

Jaq tracks the blotted figures of his vision, panning the red and smoke that permeate Westerley’s atmosphere. “I feel like I’m standing, but I know I’m sitting here with you. And I hear you. And I smell…”

The red dies down, the terrifying _everywhere-ness_ of the vision losing its saturation. Feeling returns to his mouth as the corner of it quirks upward. He opens one eye. “You had wine this morning instead of coffee.”

She raises her eyebrows with impressed appreciation. “Guess your sense of smell isn’t as inbred as mine.”

“What?” Jaq breaks into a laugh.

***

He does more with Dutch. Sometimes it’s Ma that watches them spar in Shell Seyah’s training room, and sometimes it’s Dad or Mom, depending on who needs to take care of Company business or who has an open warrant.

As Jaq gets better at his mindfulness exercises with Delle Seyah, Dutch pushes him to keep that groundwork for when he has to reach outward. Everything has to be intentional—even when they’re practiced enough to be reflex, decision-making is key. Not just the _how_ of throwing a precise fist, but the _when_. You lose your nerve for too long, you hurt yourself, or somebody that you don’t want to hurt. Thinking of the times he lost control during visions, he heeds this with care.

Another day, Zeph is on board Shell Seyah with D’avin. She gives a twenty-minute slideshow rundown on neuroanatomy, specifically the limbic system and the frontal cortex’s role in behavior. Experiencing those visions is probably like nothing you’ve encountered before, Zeph says, it’s novel, and you panic. Your amygdala processes it faster than your prefrontal lobe can, and you might panic, freeze; you react on emotion rather than reasoning. You get hi-jacked, so to speak.

It clicks in Jaq’s brain quickly—so you’re saying I just have to get used to it? Well, sort of—you can try mentally rehearsing what to do when you get hit by canon divergence land. Remove the novelty so your reasoning can be louder than your panicking. Oh, says Jaq. That makes sense.

It’s akin to the military training D’avin received when he was part of the troops, Jaq learns. Though he isn’t forced to de-tangle bungled breathing equipment under 6 feet of water, Zeph’s does take Jaq’s descriptions of the visions and recreates them in their virtual reality games. He learns that while the visions are never truly the same, he can predict with more ease when he’s at risk of getting pulled too far. Like stepping back from the fog, he practices finding a tether and holding on, keeping control of his reactions to the vision environment.

When Jaq gets tired, or his mother decides that all this is still no excuse not to continue his Qresh grade education, they’ll round up on the floor like a bunch of children as she leads a competitive quiz on Shell Seyah’s screen. Once or twice Dutch surprises them by winning first place in mathematics, beating Aneela only by a point. Or his ma might take him to get some fresh air at the Kendry gardens, teaching him how to braid flowers and conspiratorially whispering not to tell his mother what they’ve been doing to her carnations, as if Mom wouldn’t let them anyway. When Dutch is still on a roll when Jaq taps out of being flung onto the mats for the thirtieth time, she’ll challenge Delle Seyah by goading her on about her noodle arms. When she actually manages to split Dutch’s lip, she’ll forget or not care that she is being watched, and affectionately blot the blood off her mouth with gauze. His Dad and Aneela arm wrestle; his Dad always loses.

It sets a new normal. Occasionally a particularly violent vision shoves him off his mental cliff, something too quick and intense that it takes him too long to access his repertoire of skills, but they all pass in the end. Sometimes he’ll find himself leaning his head on a wall, which is much preferable to discovering he had socked a hole into it. Sometimes someone will be there to hold both of his hands and ask him to count.

_I plan my work and work my plan_ , Mom’s borrowed affirmation tapes play as Jaq stretches before bed. _I am the head bitch in charge._

* * *

_3.02.1063 — RAC, Quad Orbit._

And then it all falls to shit.

Dutch is processing the completion of her last warrant with Turin when she feels a sharp pain in the back of her shoulder. Not ten minutes later, she gets a call from Pree at Medidas.

“Get your ass to Qresh—our work-wife just got sniped.”

Dutch nearly bursts Turin’s eardrum. “ _What?_ ”

***

The one meeting she doesn’t attend, for fuck’s sake.

Her Majesty is just fine. Not every politician looking to start a coup has the resources to get their hands on a genetic bomb like Kendry can, but Seyon Rinn really had the audacity to put out a Level 5 warrant on her on the speculation that she was not, in fact, the hullen immortal she claimed to be. And he was half fucking right, too.

D’av updates her when he and Shell Seyah scoop her up from the RAC to head to Qresh. There’s still some of her blood all over his shirt, and the image of Kendry bleeding out as D’avin carries her off leaves an imprint on her mind.

“How did that warrant even get cleared?” Dutch takes a stressful swig of hokk at the co-pilot seat— the first thing she had grabbed when she boarded.

“It’s not so surprising. Every Qreshi has their favorite killjoy,” D’av says, irritated that once more, they’ll have to be investigating RAC personnel.

When they arrive on the Kendry Estate, they’re greeted by guards and shown into the main suite, where Delle Seyah is sat upright on her bed. A tube connects the back of her and Aneela’s necks, and her shoulder is bandaged and splinted. Dutch breathes a sigh of relief.

“Shoulder meat? I thought you pierced a fucking lung.”

“Oh, don’t be a drama queen,” Kendry mutters, her attention elsewhere. Her hand is clasped tight to Aneela’s, and Dutch can feel the aftershocks of rage vibrate underneath her skin from where she is standing, can see the rigid tension in her jaw. She’s surprised Aneela is here instead of terrorizing everyone at Ancestral Hall.

Jaq is sitting on a chair next to the transfusion equipment looking downward forlornly, and Dutch approaches him.

“You okay?” she asks, nudging his shoulder with her elbow.

“I guess,” he grumbles. “I could’ve stopped this, if I saw it coming.”

That seems to break Aneela out of her quiet wrath, her face immediately softening. “This is not your fault, little bear.”

“She’s right,” D’av affirms.

“Agreed.”

Jaq shrugs, fidgets with the curls of his hair.

Dutch excuses herself, walking outside to make some RAC related calls as D’av attempts to preoccupy Jaq. When that bit of housekeeping is done, she doesn’t feel like going back inside. It all just seems like one thing after another.

The sun is close to setting when Aneela finds her lounging against a tree trunk outside the Kendry gardens. She looks freshly bathed, but the frown lines have not been scrubbed away. Dutch offers Aneela her hand as she sits down on the grass beside her; Aneela takes it with both hands and cradles it.

“How is she?” Dutch asks.

“In good humor, considering.”

Dutch sighs, stares off into space, but feels Aneela’s eyes on her.

“I felt it,” Dutch says, after a moment of quiet. “When Delle Seyah was hit. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? There’s only one reason why I would feel that.”

Aneela looks down in guilt, and then lowers the neckline of her dress to reveal scarred-over flesh, just under the clavicle. The placement makes Dutch think that Kendry was aimed at when the two of them were embracing, which makes something inside her seethe.

“I tried to get in the way,” Aneela informs. “But it went clean through. That’s when I realized.”

The scar looks old, which is still inhuman without the aid of a wound wand. Nonetheless, it shouldn’t be there. “Sharing your green has weakened you, too.”

Aneela shakes her head as if to snap out of something, pulls the hem back up and returns her hands to Dutch’s. “I’ll be all right. This will fade by tomorrow.”

After some seconds of stillness, Aneela’s shoulders sag. Dutch watches her.

“This is much harder, isn’t it.”

Heartbreaking lines form between her brow, every muscle of her face in taut devastation. It’s _her_ face, but it moves so differently.

“What is?” Dutch asks, though she has an inkling.

“Protecting others instead of destroying them.” Aneela’s eyes begin to water.

“I know how that is,” Dutch says, thinking about her blood-soaked past and how she went from a dead husband to Johnny, then D’avin, then all of Old Town and the RAC, now Aneela, Jaq, Kendry. “It’s always harder when you have more in your circle to look after.”

“I’ve never been good at that, Yala. I thought I could be. But maybe everything is destined to fail at my hands.”

Dutch leans her head back against the tree. “That’s some grade-A bullshit,” she replies, not unkindly.

“Is it?” Shaking fingertips push back the overgrown fringe from Dutch’s face. “Did I not fail you when you were a child?”

Something dull sprouts in Dutch’s chest, settles there with a heaviness. She lays her head on Aneela’s good shoulder, and they huddle up together against the tree, watching the sky go from pink to purple. It feels much like the softer moments they had in the greenspace, in between fighting and escaping The Lady, talking about what it would be like if they had stayed together, like children at a sleepover.

“You’re not who I blame for that.”

“It’s cause you’re good at heart, Yala.”

Dutch wants to cry. They are offshoots of the same stupid cactus.

“Stop. What does that even fucking mean, anyway? Nothing. And even if it didn’t, you were, too. You _are._ ” She huffs a laugh. “No matter what the Rinn family will say about you after today.”

She can hear the smile that forms around Aneela’s words, the laugh that vibrates in her throat as she rests it atop Dutch’s head. “Fuck the Rinns.”

That rattles Dutch into producing a boisterous laugh, and Aneela holds her a little tighter.

“Hey,” Dutch says, remembering something suddenly. “Wait. I’ve got something to show you.”

She takes out her PDD from the inside of her jacket as Aneela looks at the screen from where her head is perched atop Dutch’s.

“Got this from Johnny when Zeph was requesting some of Lucy’s surveillance tapes to examine Jaq. Thought you should see it.” Dutch opens the file and hits play. Aneela’s breath hitches.

“Yala…”

It’s grainy and unsaturated, and the overhead angle strips the tape of any personable-ness. But there it shows Kendry, lying on her side, her hand in Dutch’s, as she prepares to de-hullenize. Her belly is full and nearly bursting, and then suddenly not. The moment Zeph pulls Jaq out, Dutch can feel little droplets fall onto her hairline.

“Oh,” Aneela sniffles, smiles with such deep joy as she watches Zeph gently place Jaq in Kendry’s hands, squirming and crying with life in her arms. _What do you feel? Everything._ “ _Oh_.”

Dutch squeezes Aneela’s forearm tucked under her chin. “It _is_ much harder, Aneela. But it’s more beautiful, too, I think.”

“Yeah,” Aneela weeps.

***

Dutch and D’avin elect to stay the night, for moral and parental support. Dutch puts on clean nightclothes and is about to join D’av in Jaq’s room for video games when Delle Seyah walks in with as much elegance as she can with a shoulder brace on.

“You’re making a speedy recovery,” Dutch says.

“That I am.” Kendry smirks, comes up to give her a light kiss on the mouth, and Dutch lets her.

She quirks an eyebrow when Kendry pulls away. “And that was for…”

“Showing Aneela the birth footage,” Delle Seyah replies, running her fingers along the base of Dutch’s neck. “I didn’t think about that. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Does your fiancée know you go around giving gratitude smooches?”

“Yes, would you like another?”

Delle Seyah leans in playfully, and winces a little when Dutch pushes her away by the shoulder brace.

“You scared the crap out of us, Kendry.”

“Aw, the Killjoy cares about me.”

Dutch removes any encouragement from her face. “I’m serious.”

Kendry deflates into a somber demeanor, and moves to sit at the edge of her and D’avin’s guest bed. “I don’t like it either, Yala.”

“Did you manage to shut down Jaq’s self blame party?”

She shakes her head. “Tried to. He’s feeling a lot of things.”

“We let it go, it festers,” Dutch sighs tiresomely, crossing her arms. “We’re on him too much, we smother him. Got any friends who had well-adjusted parents? I think we need to take notes.”

Kendry huffs. “Dutch, we _are_ the well-adjusted parents.”

“Not at this rate.” She narrows her eyes in thought, bites her lip. “I noticed something about our hatchling missions, earlier.”

“Oh?”

“They _were_ spreading out farther from the Quad. I’ve been in touch with Johnny and connections from other parts of the J, and other clusters to be sure. But now a sect of them are looping back around. Closer and closer.”

“Until they end up back here.”

The conclusion gives Dutch a ringing headache, and she presses on her temple with her fingers. “Yeah. You’d think they’d have choked on our air by now. Resilient bastards.”

Kendry looks at her, reading her. “You’re cute when you’re stressed.”

Dutch scoffs, kicks at her foot in annoyance, which does nothing to wipe the grin off her face.

Then, more seriously: “It’ll be messy, surely, but as they say. It takes a village. And you’ve got one.”

Dutch smiles. “It’s kind of gross when you’re nice to me.”

“Okay, fine. You’ve got rocks for brains and you’re going to lead us all to our deaths.”

D’av enters the room, expression quizzical when he sees Delle Seyah. “Didn’t know we were having a slumber party.”

“In your dreams,” she says. “Where’s Jaq?”

“He’s tired, wanted to get some sleep. Aneela’s in with him now.”

Delle Seyah rises with an exhale. “I should see him, too. Goodnight. Don’t miss me too much.”

She squeezes Dutch’s upper arm in goodbye, and gives D’av an affectionate punch to the gut.

* * *

_3.05.1063 — Shell Seyah._

Two days pass since the assassination attempt. They try to carry on as normal, resuming their practice, but Dutch leaves their session early, needing to accompany Delle Seyah to Medidas. With her on Mom’s ship, Jaq opts to remain in Shell Seyah’s training room. He sits in the center of the sparring mat, cross legged.

They say it’s not his fault, but he can’t shake the guilt away. If he hadn’t had any problems with his vision, Mom wouldn’t have gotten hurt. It’s fine now, he knows, but will it be the next time? Or the next?

He needs to do more. He’s not getting better quick enough. He thinks back to the lab, how they tried to stop him from going too far—they wouldn’t push him. Not the way he needs to be pushed.

Jaq closes his eyes. It’s been so long since he’s watched the avulsion of rivers from an escapable distance, but he tries to pull from what he remembers and calls them forth.

He imagines stepping into the fog, trying to see what unfurls past it. He takes one step closer, and another. A whisper interrupts his thoughts— _hybrid child_ —followed by the tinny and discordant tunes of the hatchling cries. The sound pulls at his ankle and his lungs fill with something cottony.

Stay calm, he tells himself. Use what you learned.

The cadence of his own voice in his head fades before Jaq can find purchase on it. As the world around him shifts to a chilling gray, he imagines the flat padding of the mat beneath him, the curve of his skinned knees under his palms until he can actually feel them again. In his vision, he holds a dreadnought, and the more he squeezes his knees the more he can disassociate from the way he drives it into an unknowing victim.

Cacophony trails away like waves receding from the shore, and he can stand sturdier in his mind. He’s just watching now, like how he should have always been doing.

He thinks he’s gotten past it. Good, a guiding voice tells him, keep going.

The fog waxes and wanes in density, and he can start to see impressions of a more comprehensible future, a story he can see the shape of. He sees his mother, fully recovered and as if nothing ever blasted through her flesh. Sees his Dad wearing a paper crown for his upcoming birthday in three month’s time. Dutch smiling wide, Kendry having gotten her a pottery wheel. The next prank he’ll pull on Xyah. Rings exchanged in his mothers’ hands and lighting a candle. Uncle Johnny with Lucy, landing on Westerley.

Then a shroud of cold wraps around every part of Jaq’s body. The song that sounds like hitting a metal coil against a broken bell drags him downward more viciously. He sees the hatchlings, rounding corners and lunging, stretching terrible roping tails. It reads like a memory, then it reads like nothing, then the future of another world, then _this_ future, _this_ world, and the lines that Jaq had to delineate them fade away like chalk in the rain.

He can’t feel his body. He needs someone to grab his hands, but he did this precisely because he would be alone to cope with it. _I need help_. _I need—_

_Jaq_?

His brain feels like it is liquefying, the way it would as a ship falls violently into an atmosphere. He hears _too much_ , feels _too much_ , and what was he thinking? What made him think he could do this?

_Jaqobis._

He tumbles around in his mind for what seems like forever until he finally gasps for air. He is no longer sitting on the mat, instead has knocked down some shelving and a punching bag.

“ _Jaq_ ,” Shell Seyah says, her voice clearer now. Jaq counts his breaths. Feels the goosebumps rise behind his neck. Bends down to clutch his knees until he fears they may cramp up.

“I failed,” Jaq says. “I couldn’t do it.”

“ _Do what, Jaq_?” Shell Seyah replies. “ _My programming dictates that this behavior should worry me_.”

“There are bigger things to worry about.” He rises, takes his duffle bag from the floor and makes his way to the main hall. “I’m fine. Don’t make any report.”

There’s a skeptical whir. “ _If you say, so, Jaq._ ”

He leaves Shell Seyah. The outside air helps re-ground him, but the dread in his gut doesn’t fade.

***

He tries again, a little every night when everyone is asleep. He feels one step closer to dying by the time he finishes, but he does feel the progress. If he comes strong enough overcome this, it will be worth the extra exhaustion.

He had stopped doing this on Shell Seyah, worried that her observing eye would alert his parents, who never tell him how entangled they are in everything but are getting bags underneath their eyes all the same. His mothers are preoccupied with restoring their order amongst the Eleven and figuring out hullen matters, and his other pair of parents juggle RAC investigations, hatchling missions, and regular warrant jobs. Their original training sessions lose their daily rhythm. He had thought it would buy him some free time, but instead it does the opposite. Dad calls his PDD and Mom has a guard check on him when he doesn’t answer. Dutch lingers out in the hallway pretending to see to something else, but she was never so great at acting.

Ma comes to his room every night. She asks him how he’s feeling. She’s been asking him that more often. He always lies and says he’s just tired. She doesn’t suspect that in an hour or so, he’ll sneak into the Kendry vaults to continue his self-prescribed training.

He changes. One day, Xyah runs into him in the hallways and, as per her usual antics, jokes about what he’ll do when his family reign ends in a couple of days. He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t talk to her after that.

He doesn’t talk to anyone.

***

_3.11.1063 — Kendry Estate._

It’s late morning when he passes by his mothers’ office and notices that the holo is ringing. Entering to find the room empty, he sees his grandfather’s name on the screen. Jaq hits accept.

Khlyen’s holo form appears, and his eyes meet Jaq’s in surprise. “Jaq. I wanted to check in on Aneela.”

“She’s out I think,” Jaq replies. “I can tell her you called?”

“I’ll try again later, it’s fine.” Khlyen tilts his head, examining Jaq. “But how are _you_ doing?”

“I’m okay.” Jaq can’t count how many times he’s lied when asked this question, now. He looks at the floor, clenches his jaw. “Can I ask you something?”

His grandfather nods. “Sure.”

Words roll around in Jaq’s mind until they can slot out of his mouth. “Why did the king think he had to solve it all by himself? Did he and the princess have no other family?”

Khlyen thinks, folds his hands behind his back. “They had family, yes. But no one understood like the king did. That’s what growing up can mean, Jaq. Learning that only you have the answers.”

“What answers would I even know?” Jaq looks away. “I feel like I don’t know anything. I don’t know how to _do_ anything, I’m just _useless_ —”

The anger flares up in him and sets off the flashing and tinny sounds, the periphery of his vision clouding until he can’t feel where he is in the room. The ringing is overwhelming; he thinks he can hear himself talking, his own voice vibrating in his chest.

When he comes to, he is clutching his stomach over the desk.

“Jaq?” Khlyen says, alarm on his face. Jaq turns off the holo and leaves.

* * *

_Land Kendry Outskirts._

It’s not the same beach of her youth. She remembers that the water receded a little farther away on Kin Rit lands. Here, it only takes a few steps from the rocks for the cold ocean to swish past her ankles and lure her in. She imagines that the beaches of her time have undergone the same transformation. During the hundreds of years she had been away, everything had been changing without her.

Aneela breathes in the salty air and looks out at the horizon, holding up the hem of her dress above the lapping water. Everything has been too noisy lately; she savors this quiet. This break will be short-lived; it’s back to state and family matters soon enough.

“Ma?”

She turns around to see Jaq, standing above the rocky platform, freshly changed into his day clothes.

“Jaq,” she smiles warmly. “Good afternoon.”

“Hi. Dutch said you were here. Are you staying here for a bit?”

“If you’d like me to, little bear.”

He sits down at the ledge of a rock, and Aneela delicately steps out of the shallow tides to join him with wet and sandy feet.

She locks arms with him, and they look at the clouds.

“I’m sorry I haven’t talked with you properly in a while.”

“It’s okay.”

“Not really.” She turns her head to inspect his face, sees deep lines under his reddened eyes, and something in her chest tightens. “You don’t look well.”

He avoids her gaze, neither confirming or refuting her statement. Jaq looks off to the side, but she delicately catches his chin with the tips of her fingers, gently coaxing him to look in her direction.

The way his face contorts starts a tornado in her mind. She thinks at first that he’s having another painful vision, but she’s seen this face before, looking into Yala’s memories in the greenspace.

“Jaq,” she whispers. “What’s going on?”

He shakes his head, nudging her hand away from his face. “Nothing, I’m fine.”

“You’ve been saying that a lot,” Aneela says.

Jaq shrugs, looks off at the tides, the foam collecting on edges of each wave that washes over the shore. Aneela doesn’t take her eyes off of him. Something has happened.

“Am I a good son?”

The question is like a knife to the gut.

“What are you talking about? Of course you are.”

“But am I?” he presses. “What do I give you?”

“Everything. Where is this coming from?”

Jaq wiggles out of her grasp and stands up, beginning to pace. She rises after him, the rough ground scraping her bare feet.

“Jaq?”

“I was just trying to do this on my own,” he says, voice cracking. “That’s how we won the first time, because I was there. This is what I was made for, wasn’t it? To save everyone?” He stills just enough to face her with his full body. “Isn’t that why you made me?”

The tears spill out before Aneela can fully process what’s happening. She hears echoes in her head of Yala asking why she had made her, asking her why she had thrown her away. Her world feels like it is crumbling at her own hands. Isn’t this always the way? Everything around her had changed, but _why couldn’t this?_

“No, Jaq,” she cries, rushing forward to hold his face with shaking fingers. “No, no. I just wanted you to _be_.”

He slips away from her, covering his ears in agony. She reaches forward to steady him, but then a bubbling from the beach snatches her attention. There’s a high-pitched ringing that multiplies from all sides of her as dark blurs move from behind the shrubs and other rocks—and then terribly, out onto the shoreline, a hatchling crawls out of the water.

It springs upward.

The last thing she sees is Jaq pushing after her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like D’avin I just really want the forbidden Kendry lore. Making it up isn’t nearly as fun. :(


	4. CONFLUENCE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content Warnings: unconsented medical procedure, major character death (IT’S GONNA BE OKAY), body-wearing, physical violence, death from illness, blood mentions**

The moments that pass come to his consciousness only as floating impressions. He remembers running, heart pounding, _what did I do what did I do what did I do_ , thrumming, falling. _Jaq, what happened_? _I don’t know. I don’t know. Help me._ Boarding a ship. Everything covered in shadows.

_What are you doing_?

_We need to take you away, Jaq. They’re following you. We need to buy some time._

Lying on a table, wrists cuffed. A syringe goes into his arm. _No. No._

_You have the answers._

The world goes white, white, white—

_Find them._

***

_??.??.???? — ????????_

The overwhelming brightness clears and leaves his senses raw. Jaq has feeling in his limbs again, a clarity in his head that he hasn’t felt in a long time. He puts a hand to his chest, feels the fabric of the white and gray tunic covering his body. Having no recollection of changing his clothes, or getting here for that matter, he looks around at the room he finds himself in—a medium sized sleeping quarter, with a neat bed, dresser, and mirror. The walls are monochrome, and the Kendry that lives in his mind wonders if it would have killed the designer to add a splash of color.

(Mom. Ma. Dad. Dutch. Where are they?)

Jaq walks to the corner of the room to the upright mirror, preparing himself for what he’ll see. Apart from the tunic and the silver circlet around his head, it’s him—same face, general shape of his body, the dark coils of hair, the light brown of his skin—but something in his eyes has changed. Deeper, older. He cranes his neck and lowers down his collar to reveal a circular scar.

It’s not just visions any more, he realizes. He’s _here_. He’s in the world he kept stumbling into, properly. Getting burned in the atmosphere, to crash-landing on its surface.

And he has no idea how to get back.

He hears a whisper crescendo around him, startling him. Something taps on his door. Swallowing, he shapes The Lady’s voice in his throat to answer.

Yes? Too polite. Come in. No. “What do you want?”

The door creaks open to reveal a slithery black tail, rounds of tiny teeth on the sucker. _Mother_ , _mother_ , he hears in his mind, and he can’t help but to hang his jaw open as a hatchling the size of a bull crawls in, a smaller one in tow.

_Mother, we are bored. Have you any more humans to feed us?_

What the fuck, Jaq thinks. He clears his throat. “In time… my pets.” My pets? Was he the Wicked Witch of Westerley?

The small one tumbles and rolls across the floor like a hyperactive dog, the many-tongues of its mouth bobbing as it pants. Then it crawls toward Jaq, legs tapping on Jaq’s torso.

_You seem different._

Jaq sweats. “Your mother is tired.”

The larger hatchling bonks the smaller one on the head with its tail.

_Stop bothering her. We must go._

_Okay, okay, fine, fine._

They scurry out and Jaq turns around to hold his head in rising panic.

He closes his eyes, takes in shaky breaths. If he has usurped The Lady’s place in his body, and the hatchlings are here, then it must mean everything has been done. Everyone he knows must be long dead. His heart beats in painful pulses, he wills himself to calm down, but tears up instead. What were even the last things he had said to his family? He can’t remember.

This isn’t real, he reminds himself. This isn’t the universe he’s from. Home is out there, and he will return. He just needs to figure out how.

Wiping his eyes and shaking the grief away from his shoulders, he composes himself into someone he thinks The Lady would be. Chin up, never a trace of a smile—not hard given the circumstances, but if he weren’t so completely out of his depth he acknowledges that he would have found the hatchling children funny.

He exits the sleeping quarters to more of the same styled corridors, circular and with archways reminiscent of thick spiderwebs. He makes sure to walk slowly and with purpose, not to betray how he has no idea where he is. Occasionally a hatchling skitters past, gives him a telepathic greeting.

Eventually he reaches a main room with a large window, spanning the entire wall. Walking closer, he sees Old Town, horizon obfuscated by an orange mist, tall uninviting buildings scattered along the skyline. He looks down to find that he is on the highest level of a tower, stories and stories draping down to the streets ravaged by more hatchlings.

Taking a deep breath. He makes the decision to explore more thoroughly. He locates the elevator, and waits tantalizingly long seconds until he reaches the ground level.

He’s never been to Old Town in person, doesn’t really know what it should look like in the natural state of things. He only recalls what he saw with Delle Seyah in of the Arkyn labs, watching on screens as everything unfolded. The brainwashing rains, the roles that didn’t fit.

Jaq walks down the streets, still trying to maintain the I’m-The-Lady facade. _I’m the head bitch in charge_ , he finds himself echoing from Mom’s tapes. His stomach twists at the sight of dried blood along the sidewalks, wondering whose it is. A sign on a rusty gate of an alleyway compels him to walk through, and upon finding a staircase underneath a hatch, he descends.

A mossy colored raincoat is hung up on the wall. Stinks a bit. It’s dry, though the ground above is still damp—no one’s been wearing it go outside, not for a while. There are machines and computers on top of what looks to be surgery tables, along with other devices and wires cluttering up the space. A half-used roll of duct tape under the table. Jaq realizes with a pang that there is only one person who could have been here.

“Zeph?” he whispers, and then calls out again, a little louder. “It’s Jaq. Are you here?”

Nothing. He tries to power on the computer. Still nothing. Dried blood cakes the space between the buttons of the keyboard. He turns away before he can wonder if a hatchling did away with her or if The Lady in his body saw to it herself.

He goes up the steps fighting the haze that threatens to take over him. Concentrating on recreating the map of Old Town he’d seen, he finds his way to The Royale. The doors are unlocked. As if he could expect anything different, it is empty and abandoned, smells vaguely like rotting.

He walks around, trying doors. Finding more emptiness, smelling more rot.

Funnily enough, hardly anything behind the bar has been touched. Perhaps the hatchlings don’t crave alcohol as humans do. They surely don’t have the opposable thumbs to hold them. He takes an unopened bottle of hokk, and takes a swig. The memory of one of his birthdays comes to him, the laughter, the cheers. There is no one to pat his back when he coughs this hokk up.

A paper sticks out from under the bar, wedged between two glasses. Unfolding it, he discovers Gared’s chickenscratch scrawl—a discreet love note to Pree. _i lov yew. think abowt us all the tim._ _wish i dezervd yew._

His face scrunches up, holding in the acute sadness. He stuffs the note into his pocket, takes another gulp of the hokk, coughs again. Doesn’t really get the stories Dad told him about people drinking away their sorrows—it only seems to compound on his. Poor choices.

Jaq leaves The Royale, heading back to The Lady’s tower. Maybe there _are_ still people he knows out there, just hiding, maybe there are files he can look through to find them. He’s running through the options and possibilities with a struggling concentration when he bumps into someone—too soft and warm to be a hatchling.

He looks up. He freezes.

Aneela.

“Mother,” she says, in a tone that feels gratingly wrong in that mouth.

_Ma._ The word hits the roof of his mouth and dies there. He feels cold.

Aneela smiles crookedly. It’s not the way she would smile. This isn’t the way she would even stand. She is all jagged and shaking lines, like she could disappear from existence with a snap of a finger.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere. The second transfer is almost complete. Would you like to see?”

***

She escorts him back to the tower, unsuspecting, walking by his side.

“What were you doing out here?” she asks.

Jaq clears his throat. “One of the… I was asked if there were any more humans to eat.”

She lets out a brief shrill laugh through her nose. “And you indulged them. How funny of you.”

He feels like hurling.

Not Aneela leads him to the basement levels of the tower. He stares at her back as the elevator descends—she is dressed in a similar manner to him, marking allegiance to the Lady.

“You’re rather quiet, Mother.”

Jaq holds his own hands to stop them from shaking. “I’m eager to see what you will show me, is all.”

The doors open to a kind of lab, cryopods and machines lining the walls. When she walks out first, he notices the awkward bending of her legs.

As if to feel his eyes on her, she turns to him. “I’m still getting used to this body,” she says, and the words send Jaq further into dizziness.

“Are you.”

“Hm. I do like it though. She’s got a nice voice.” Her teeth bare in a mischievous smile, eyes widening manically. “Bit loud on the inside, though.”

She turns away, looking ahead as she leads him to the final pod, lid open.

Where Dutch lays.

His instinct is to shake her awake, but he knows the moment he does it’s all over for him. Heat rises to his ears as he refrains himself from crying, hands gripped tightly behind his back. A headset fastened over her skull connects to another closed pod containing a hatchling. _A transfer_. Jaq understands with aching clarity what is going to happen.

“I was skeptical at first, but that Khlyen human might have had the right idea,” Not Aneela says, staring down at Dutch’s comatose body with an unreadable expression. “He really would do anything for his daughters, wouldn’t he?”

“Khlyen,” Jaq repeats, mouth dry. “And where is he now?”

“On the business you sent him on, silly,” Not Aneela laughs, and he can’t help but shudder. “Looking for new bodies on Qresh, after your first success: me.”

Jaq watches the slow rise and fall of Dutch’s chest. She’s still alive, and he can’t do anything to stop what will happen very soon. “Was the process painful for you?”

“No more painful than coming into the world usually is,” Not Aneela says. “Annoying, maybe. This girl cries to herself far too often.”

Tears spring to his eyes immediately, wanting to shake her and call to the Aneela that is still inside. He looks away.

“Maybe we should wait until we can fix that.”

“Nonsense. Please, Mother. Enjoy the show…”

His heart sinks down to his stomach as Not Aneela pulls down the lever, and the machines buzz and whir to life, its lights blinking along the console and headsets and wires. The hatchling lurches and convulses, hitting the lid of the pod in a horrible rhythm. At the same time, Dutch’s eyes snap open, her mouth gaping open as she struggles for air, the muscles of her neck tensing. She flounders against her restraints, fingers curling. Jaq watches, immobilized.

In what seems like forever, the convulsing slows, and Dutch’s body calms down. The machine makes a grotesque chime.

Not Aneela walks briskly to Dutch’s side and unclasps the headset and undoes the straps.

“Well?” she says. “Are you in there, you greens for brains?”

Dutch— _Not Dutch_ —blinks into proper consciousness, shakes and shivers as she sits upright. Her jaw moves in strange ways until it settles into shape.

“Don’t insult me.”

Not Aneela smiles, and hoists Not Dutch to her feet. Jaq wants to run.

“What do you think, Mother?” Not Dutch shakes out, breath too raspy, R’s too round. “Does she suit me?” She winces. “Oh, she is loud.”

“All humans are, unfortunately,” Not Aneela laments, holding her hand primly. It’s a very _Aneela_ way to move, and the deepening realization that _they are still in there_ shakes in his brain in chaotic discord.

He can’t take it. He turns away, and walks quickly with balled fists to the elevator. He needs to leave. He needs to wake up. Is he asleep? Where are his tethers? What he would do to hear a voice that wasn’t a bastardization of theirs—

They call after him curiously, but blindly he makes his way out of the tower and to the Old Town streets. Bile rises at the stench of the air; he makes a turn into an alley, bends down near the gutters and vomits.

The acid burns his throat. Did he even eat? What did he eat here?

He leans against the greasy wall, closing his eyes and trying to steady his breath. His heart hammers inside his ribs, his stomach churns.

“You don’t look too well.”

Jaq turns around at the alley way opening, where Not Aneela is stood menacingly.

“What’s going on with you?”

Every time she speaks Jaq goes dizzy. It’s all wrong, the accusation in her tone in place of concern. He puts a hand to his temple, an ache blooming there.

“I’m fine.”

Not Aneela sneers. “Liar.”

Before he can protest, she has him pinned against the wall with her forearm.

“You’re not her,” she breathes, pressing harder up to his neck. “You’re the hybrid brat.”

“Ma, please, stop,” he cries, and can’t bear to face her when she laughs, sharp and fluttering.

He squirms, and she holds him there. It’s clear that she will not stop. That if he waits for even longer, she’ll do something else, so he acts— _it’s not just the how, but the when—_ and raises his knee to kick at her middle. The wind knocked out of her, she stumbles back against the opposite alley wall in an ungraceful loss of balance.

He makes a run for the exit, but skids to a stop when he sees Not Dutch blocking the way, cracking her knuckles. Not Aneela is slowly rising to her feet not too far behind him. His heart pounds, his lungs seem to expand. But if he loses his nerve for too long—

Not Dutch lunges forward and aims her fist at Jaq’s head; he reflexively deflects it with a taut hand, taking it off course, and with his other hand, knocks under Not Dutch’s rib before locking her into an armbar. Not Aneela approaches behind him— so he turns, bends, and swings Not Dutch over his shoulder, her body thudding onto the ground loudly. Dutch herself had flung him like this perhaps a hundred times—but it had been on padded training mats, not ever with the intention to bruise or break him, and the crunch of her body as it hits the cement puts a sick feeling in his stomach.

He can’t think about that now. He mustn’t. But he doesn’t want to keep fighting them. Not Aneela trips over her body clumsily, the hatchling in her still not accustomed to bipedal movement— and so he runs.

He sprints down the streets, dodging curious hatchlings of various sizes, trying to escape the tangles of Old Town. Eventually he makes it to a clearing behind one of the abandoned buildings, but he can already feel the dread finding purchase on reality when he turns the corner. His running did very little.

Not Aneela does not hesitate in pushing him down to the ground, knees on both sides of his torso and her hands wrapped around his neck.

“What did you do with her?” she spits out angrily, her eyes wide and face snarling.

Jaq tries to think, does he have a knife tucked away, can he tug on the hair curtaining his periphery, what has Dutch taught him that he could use. The circlet digs into the back of his head, grinding painfully on the ground, and he’s flooded with fear and heartbreak, he just wants his _mother_ —

Something stirring in his chest lights and spreads through him. Inexplicable strength brings his body upward, shoving at Not Aneela with such a force that she flies backward and her head bangs dull on a wall. Jaq stares at his outstretched hands, feeling the tingles of the Lady’s powers fizzle from his palm. It is truly one overwhelming realization after another.

But this one he can use. He takes one last look at her unconscious form, unable to decide whether the knowledge that she’ll be fine later is a relief to him or no. She’s still in there, and he hurt her. But the hatchling is there, too, and it wants to kill him. Wires cross in his brain and the loudest thought that can be produced is _his mother wants to kill him_.

He scrambles back up, and continues to run.

***

He leaves Old Town, but the Westerlyn moon can’t be that big. He’s been heading in a straight line for nearly an hour on an abandoned motorbike, and he wonders how much longer until he just loops around back again.

The image of Not Aneela sneering at him flashes back into his mind, no matter how many times he tries to blink and shake it away. He still feels the grip of her hands around his throat. Aneela had never laid a harmful hand on him, would never have, and even though he knows that it wasn’t really her, deep betrayal seeps into every cell in his body.

He wants his mother. His other mother, his mother-aunt-big-sister, his dad, to watch some joy jocs, play some Evil Kickball. _Do we need to hold you more?_ He should have said yes. Jaq lied when he said he was fine so many times, and he’s not, he rarely ever was since this whole fucking thing started.

He hits a stray lump of junk, and the engine of the bike splutters to its death as he skids down the damp asphalt roads of whatever wasteland he’s driven himself to. He tumbles off the bike, cursing as he tries to catch his fall and gets his palms and wrist scratched up in the process.

“Fuck,” he hisses, and then shouts. “Fuck!”

He wishes Dad were around to tell him to watch his mouth. Caked in dust and dirt, Jaq folds in on himself, and cries.

***

The air is different in the wastelands, which Jaq reasons is why there are less hatchlings running amok. Not that it made much of a difference in the universe he’s from, though. Nonetheless, one or two will come across him, and he yells at them to leave him be, threatens to push them off with the powers he apparently has here. They’re obedient children.

He wonders what Not Aneela is planning. If he thinks about it, she is also just trying to find her own mother—but the sharp pain of his solitude removes any room for empathy. She took away his, it’s only right that he did the same, inadvertently or no. But even as something righteous simmers inside of him as he thinks this, it does nothing to quiet his sadness. Revenge never did suit him, not like this.

Approaching a different patch of land, he sees a collection of barns and sheds that line the horizon above the sea of dead grass and shrubs. He nearly collapses from sheer relief, but knows he can’t stop yet. Eventually, he spots a well near one of the sheds and wills his sore feet to run to it. He kneels, reaches deep for the thankfully clear water, and brings palm-fulls of it to his mouth. His entire body cools as the water travels down his throat to his stomach, where the tight aching there begins to ease just a little.

The comfort of the water distracts him so thoroughly that he doesn’t sense the other presence behind him.

When he thinks to turn around, an arm swings at him—he ducks ungracefully, stumbling on the ground and nearly hitting his head on the well.

His attacker, basically half on top of him, parries a knife in his direction; he flinches with his heart in his throat, moving his head far enough that the tip rebounds off the stone of the well.

Adrenaline sharpens his vision, and he finally sees who is in front of him.

_New bodies on Qresh_.

“No,” he nearly cries, which angers whatever is wearing Delle Seyah’s face. “Not you, too.”

She snarls. “Shut up.”

In anguish and anger, he butts his head on her chin, hearing a gross _clack_ of her jaw. He scrambles upward to run, but a hand hooks around his ankle. Jaq trips and gets a mouthful of grass.

They’re caught in a scuffle, with Jaq trying to knock her down but not too hard and the other showing no such mercy. She pins him down to the ground, the edge of her knife pressed against his neck.

He keeps his eyes screwed shut, feeling the tears accumulate there. He doesn’t want to see her face, the cruelty of it, the emptiness.

“Fine,” he says, shaky. “Just do it. I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m tired.”

Jaq tenses and prepares to feel her slice into him. But there is no such moment.

“What?” she says.

He opens his eyes. Confusion is carved into every part of her face.

It’s her. It’s actually _her_.

“Mom?”

In a wave of painful happiness he pushes upward, but she presses him down again, harder.

“You’ve got a _lot_ of nerve calling me that.”

“Mom, no— it’s really me!”

“And how do I know that?” she asks, so many things laced in her voice: impatience, hope, grief, hate.

Jaq opens and closes his mouth, trying to think, trying not to be a big fucking baby and cry.

She shows no sympathy for his floundering. She rolls her eyes in exasperation, keeps the knife at his neck, the edges of it drawing a line of blood. “After everything I have been through, if it turns out you’re just using his face to toy with me, I _will_ kill you. I’ll be happy to.”

Her face looks older. More lines around her eyes, her cheeks sunken. Her skin is pale and dry, no longer that healthy semi-golden glow that she had after spending hours under the sun with him in the forest, which is when the last time This World’s Jaq would have seen her.

He takes a gamble.

“You have this morning routine on Qresh,” he says quietly, willing his shivering to calm. “You wake up stupidly early before everyone else and do yoga on the roof. You like your coffee with condensed milk. You listen to tapes that tell you how much of a bad bitch you are.”

Mom doesn’t move, but something knits between her eyebrows. He continues.

“I also know that your first name is actually short for something else. By one syllable, which you cut out when you inherited Land Kendry, because it didn’t sound as good to you. If you never stopped your dad’s plans when you were younger, right now you’d be Adelle of Land Lahani. And maybe the Lahani kid would’ve been your actual son, instead of me.”

She shakes her head. “Most of those things I’d never even told Aneela. I certainly never told you. How would you know?”

“Because you would have. You did—tell me—in the future that I’m from. A different future, where none of this ever happened.” He curls his fingers around her wrist, a quiet beg. “I am your son. I can explain it better later. But it really is me.”

A few moments pass that feel like forever and nothing at the same time. Then she retracts her hand, places the blade back inside its sheath on her belt. She pulls back, allowing Jaq to bring himself to a sitting position.

Mom stares at him, lip quivering. And then she wraps her arms around him, tight. Stunned, he tenses, but the warmth of her eases the fatigue out of his body. Putting his arms around her back, Jaq lets himself cry into her shoulder.

***

Night falls, and his mother lights the hearth in one of the abandoned farmhouses. They sit close to each other, sharing what she has of her scavenged grits and bars of who-knows-what.

Her eyes don’t leave him, her knees drawn up as if she’s shielding herself. She still has her archery suit, a little too much wear and tear for her usual liking. He wonders how long she’s been out here.

“I was following you from Old Town,” she says, voice raspy. “I thought you were The Lady. Looked awfully gangly for a millennia-old entity, though.”

Jaq chews at the mystery bar, trying to ignore the unpleasant textures. Delle Seyah tilts her head forward to catch his eyeline, brow furrowed.

“What you said earlier. What did you mean?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I still need to know it.”

He pauses, takes a moment to think as he stares at the flames crunching at the wood.

“Things happened differently for me. The world I know isn’t like this. We won against The Lady; you and Ma took me back to Qresh. You all threw my fourteen birthdays.”

The memory of it, just pleasant and warm before, now places an ache in his ribs.

“And now somehow, I’m here. Where none of that ever got to happen.”

Mom looks at him with a mixture of sadness and joy. Eventually it folds into something that is just raw hurt.

“We watched her kill you, Jaq,” she whispers, eyes wet.

_Queens don’t cry, remember. This one does, now. She’s a teeny bit broken._ It’s cruel, this echo of their time together.

“We watched her emerge wearing your face.”

Jaq grimaces, the pain of imagining what she had felt too sharp in his gut. “What happened? How are you here?”

She shifts her gaze to the fireplace, wiping the fallen tears away.

“We got separated after, the four of us. Your father and I managed to get out. John wasn’t so lucky. He died.” Her eyes flick back to meet his. “I know what’s happened to Aneela and Yala. So you don’t have to tell me.”

Jaq’s eyes sting. “You said you were with my dad. Where is he now?”

He watches her eyebrows slant upward, the fire reflecting in the tears of her eyes.

“We tried to go back for Aneela and Yala, before any transfers happened. But we came away with something else. They put something in our blood—it’s what they do to prep the bodies.” She shakes her head, sniffles. Looks at Jaq with so much sorrow. “I’ve always been better at surviving out of sheer spite. But he could only last a few weeks. I’m sorry, Jaq.”

Jaq can feel his heart shredding. Dad is dead, too. He wonders what their last words were to each other, if they even got to have any.

And then something else in her words settles over him.

“But then—that means that _you_ …”

She nods once. “Correct.”

He holds his head in his hands, appetite expiring, not that it was ever really there. He feels her hand rest on his back. She shifts, and he lays down on her lap.

***

_Day Two — Salt Plains._

He wakes up on the floor to Mom tossing a rag at him. She’s cleaner now, having scrubbed herself by one of the wells.

“Freshen up. I’m taking you somewhere.”

Jaq uses the cloth and a bucket to wipe the dirt off his arms, legs, face, and hair. His mother hands him a t-shirt and cargo pants that were left in one of the shed’s dressers. They fit him a little too large, so he ties two of the belt loops together with a string to cinch the waist snug.

She leads him through thick fields silently, occasionally looking back and touching his arm as if to be certain that he’s still there with her. Delle Seyah was never much of a hand-holder, but Jaq takes hers after the third or fourth time.

They reach a desiccated forest. At the center of a triangle of those mangled dead trees is a wooden pike as tall as his waist, stuck straight into the ground.

A vest is hung over it. It’s Dad’s.

He lets go of his mother’s hand to approach it, falling to his knees on the dirt.

“You buried him here.”

She rummages through her bag to take out some sticks and sprigs of decent-looking dried herbs tied together with twine. She lays it beneath the pike.

“Despite everything, your father was my friend,” she says. “Of course I buried him.”

He wonders what they had gone through together for the admission to leave her so easily. She sits beside him, and takes out more of the mystery bar. Jaq exhales out a sad laugh. It’s a family breakfast.

“What else was it like?” she asks, after a while. “Where you’re from.”

Jaq stares at the makeshift bouquet, then smiles softly. “You and Ma are getting married, back home.”

She lets out a scoff, not in ridicule but in envy. Her smile breaks out wider and wider as he goes on.

“You’re invoking the Perpetuum Pact. Re-hullenizing. You smoke Qush with Dad, and I pretend I don’t know. You’re probably having an open affair with Dutch, but that was none of my business. You all formed this Parent Council to make decisions about me and it’s kind of annoying, but I get the intention.”

Mom eyes go glassy. “She’s one lucky bitch.” She puts a hand on his wrist. “And you? What was going on with you?”

“Everything was going okay.” Jaq sags his shoulders. “Until I started getting weird visions of this world. It was getting bad. You all took care of me. But then I did something just so _stupid_ , and I can’t remember—I think I hurt someone, I—”

Tears fall from his eyes in anger at himself. Mom’s grip on his wrist tightens.

“I’m going to get you back home, Jaq,” she says, steadfast in her determination. “If that is the last godsdamn thing I do here.”

“But how?”

She goes quiet, deflating a little. After a while, she says, “Aneela would know.”

Something lights up in Jaq’s head. “She would,” he says. “And I think we can ask her.”

Mom flinches at the suggestion. “What?”

“She’s still in there, inside. The hatchling told me so. If we can find a way to just…” he moves his hands in the air, grasping for the words. He snaps his fingers: “Wake her up.”

She leans back, scoffing a little and looking away. “If you’re suggesting true love’s kiss, I’m afraid she’s told you too many fairy tales.”

Jaq looks at her earnestly. “If there’s anyone who can bring her out, it’s you.”

That seems to stop the protest right in her throat. She looks off at Dad’s vest, tired. Faint sadness tinged with nostalgia washes over her features.

“If your father were here, he’d tell me to do it. No question. That stupid lug of a man.” She meets Jaq’s eyes again. “Okay.”

He smiles at her, and she smiles back.

She stands, and with a hand brings him to his feet. Mom takes the vest from the pike, pats some of the dust and debris off it. Then hands it to Jaq.

“Take it. He’d want you to.”

Jaq does. His shoulders aren’t nearly broad enough to fill it, but he decides he’ll keep it on for as long as he can. He takes a whiff of the collar— the strange cleanliness of it suggests that someone had washed it recently, but for his mother’s sake, he doesn’t bring it up.

Before they depart, they bow, and Mom recites an orison in First Tongue. Having learned only a smattering from her before, it takes him a while to realize that the closing line isn’t a traditional one at all.

“What did that last part mean?”

Delle Seyah exhales a laugh from her nose. “‘ _Emotional cowards are shitheads who end up alone and deserve it_.’”

Roughly, she adds.

***

_Day Three — Parallax Zone._

They make plans. They’re good at those. Just a tad more difficult, though, when Jaq doesn’t seem to have his Sight here.

Jaq and his mother scavenge around the farmhouses for supplies, and make their way. On account of being stuck on Westerley for much longer than she’s ever wanted, Mom takes the lead. It won’t be safe being out in the open, and as far as she knows, the underground train hubs remain relatively creature-free. The hatchlings enjoy the outdoor wind a bit too much.

They walk with their shoes in their bags, with the risk of being heard in the reverb of the Parallax Zone. It’ll be a little over a day until they get to the hub that connects to where The Royale used to be.

They move in silence, until Mom stumbles, coughs roughly into her elbow band. When she pulls it away, splatters of blood speckle her lips.

“Mom,” Jaq whispers, rushing to her.

“I’m fine. I just need a break.”

Pulling into a narrow inlet, they settle onto the floor to drink water and have a snack. Jaq slowly learns not to mind the mystery bars, but his mother never fails to pull a face every time she takes a thin bite.

“Are you in pain?” Jaq asks, sat across from her. She leans her head against the cold metal wall.

“Constantly.”

His brow creases, feeling useless. “Is there anything I can do?”

Mom looks at him, takes his wrist again. “Stop fretting.”

“I can’t.”

She sits up straight, puts a finger to his mouth. “I mean,” she mouths. “Stop talking.”

His eyes go wide, and he turns an ear to the main tunnel. He hears it then: distant tapping, vague slobbering. He counts the rhythmic steps, determines that there is only one of them down the hall.

_Mother, mother, mother_ —

He recognizes it’s voice. It was the small one that had rolled around in his room and begged for his attention the day before.

Delle Seyah carefully takes out two guns—one for each hand, and gestures for Jaq to take her bow. They wait, see if it passes on its own. But Jaq’s mind is too noisy, too unwieldy. The hatchling senses him.

_Mother?_

It turns the corner, and with quick precision Delle Seyah puts two bullets in its body, one through its mouth and the other in its abdomen. Jaq gasps at the tinny cry he hears in his mind. An anguish floods him, heavy and congealing. He wonders if Aneela had felt this when he had been shot in the chest.

Its body falls to the floor, legs twitching miserably. Jaq rises to his feet and approaches the hatchling.

“Jaq, be careful—”

_M…_

_“_ Shh,” he says to the hatchling, tentatively putting his hand over its hard chitin head. “You can let go.”

It does what it is told. His mind goes quiet. The blood seeps, staining Jaq’s socks. His mother is silent behind him.

“This all started when I killed one of them,” Jaq says, the aftershocks of grief running laps inside his ribs. “I think I know why I’m here.”

* * *

_Old Town._

This body is so loud. It (I—She—) is all she (It—I—) can think about. It’s truly harshing her vibe, as Same-Face has taken to saying.

“Why don’t you shut up and enjoy the view,” It—I—She says to the crying girl in her head.

Eyes scan the Westerlyn horizon from the main room’s window, standing where Mother should be.

“You’re supposed to have been a centuries old conqueror? Pitiful.”

This body is too soft, too, she finds. Has too many cravings beyond hunger. Her older body was just fine, now that she thinks about it. Her kind finds this new existence vitalizing, as they are wont to do after millennia of near extinction, and she misses the wide expanse of the hive mind. The green coursing through this one’s veins is a useless substitute. The crude bog-scum, the very thing that had trapped Mother, too. At least this body won’t die. That surely is a plus, at least.

The girl’s voice rings again in her mind.

“Oh, boohoo,” she sneers, turning on her heel to go to the elevators. The roof feels nicer, anyway. “Your son will be restored to his destined state, soon enough. Mother’s.”

When the doors open to the roof enclosure, Same-Face is there, laughing and rough-housing with another of their still-clawed siblings. This body is fond of Same-Face, she can feel it in her chest.

“Be careful,” she says. “These bones love to break. Yours won’t heal so easily as mine do.”

Same-Face rolls on her back, tickling the underside of their sibling hopping above her. “Just having some fun. Little brother here tells me that the boy has been spotted.”

Her mouth waters. Finally something truly exciting. She snaps her fingers, and Still-Clawed scuttles away. Same-Face sits up, blowing her loose hair out of her face and pouting. She pats the dust off her white uniform.

It-I-She walks to the edge of the roof and grips the bars of the fence, sighing gleefully. It will give her great pleasure to kill him, as Mother did the first time. She ruminates in detail how she might do it. Perhaps in front of his other mother, if she does not perish before he does. Perhaps she’ll wear him next? Or she can wear the other mother, and kill him then—

A hot burst flares in between her ears, and she gasps. Her vision blackens, flashes to her old claws racing toward the boy—the sick feel of daggers in her abdomen—the boy’s eyes—

“Sister,” Same-Face’s voice brings her back to the present. It-I-She clutches at her throat. “Are you okay?”

“I hate these bodies,” she rasps.

“I quite like them,” Same-Face says, approaching her and arranging her arms around her.

“What are you doing.”

“Giving you a hug.”

“Why.”

“Because these bodies can. And it seemed like you needed one. Isn’t that neat?” Same-Face laughs dreamily.

It-I-She scoffs, but smiles.

The skies cast in a rather aggressive mix of iron and rust. Ah, the infamous storms. That’s the ticket. “I have a job for you.”

Same-Face sways in her embrace. “Good. I like jobs.”

* * *

_Day Four — Parallax Zone._

They find out the rather difficult way that the Black Rains are coming. What was an attempt to check the time of day became nursing Jaq’s burned hand with improvised salve made with the last of their water, and some of the leftover herbs she had collected for D’avin’s grave. It heals quicker that it would have on her, but admonishes herself nonetheless. She admittedly should have seen this coming. Though, to be fair, it’s not like she ever tagged along when she or others of The Company would order an execution of this fashion.

Kendry feels herself grow weaker every hour, but they trek on. Her body, which had been held together via spite, is starting to let go. Jaq himself must know from firsthand experience that she was never truly in her depth when it came to uncertainty. And when the driving force behind her life’s purpose shifted from Aneela to revenge, it was enough. It was _certain_. But now— with entirely new possibilities…

It was the same thing that drew her to Aneela. Never claim what you might lose, yet she ended up doing the very thing. She is doing it even now. She learned, pitifully, that you can’t just close it back up once you become painfully open-hearted. And with Jaq almost literally dropping back into her lap after all she had lost—him, Aneela, Yala, D’avin; gods, even John Jaqobis—her heart was just very, very open.

No. Aneela still powered her. The love of her son powered her, too, once she got over herself, once her survival and his became gravitationally bound to each other. It was always that open-heartedness that was the game-changer, and the fucking hippy-dippy irony of it all makes her seethe, as it always had when she’d stop to think about it. She’d been absolutely neutralized by every cliché truism there was about life-changing love.

They make a turn that she knows runs under the Old Town perimeter. It won’t be long now, until she may or may not come face to face with Aneela.

The other hatchlings must have felt it when she had shot the small one dead—they’d come across more and more, and each time she must endure Jaq’s attempts to mask his pain when she kills them. However happy she is to continue, her willingness to try something else in lieu of murder is met by his insistence that he can handle it. He won’t use The Lady’s powers against them, for whatever reason.

“Tell me more about your world,” she says, hoping it’ll distract him. “Did you like it on Qresh?”

“Yeah,” he replies. “I had fun.”

“Friends?” It’s an odd question in her mouth, given the planet they lived in.

“Xyah and I get along. Mavo Derrish.”

“ _Derrish_. Huh.”

“And one of the Hyponias, which annoys you.”

She shakes her head in feigned disappointment. “And what do you do together?”

“Games. Pranks. Like you used to do—you taught me the pink teeth trick that you used on Uncle Liam.”

“Sounds like me.” She looks at him with a raised eyebrow. “And did I really tell you about my name?”

“Well, not at first. I was being a snoop and found your birth records. And then you made me promise not to tell Dutch or Dad, because they’d never let you live it down.”

She laughs, but it comes out tragically. His words are full of a history she had no mind to imagine, just a few days ago. She slows down her pace, looking at him. Heart open. The last time she had seen him, spoke with him properly, before she had really lost it all, she had just begun to put things right. Never got to honor what she told him. In her version of events, she never got to know which of her words were louder to Jaq.

Her throat feels clotted. “Was I a good mother to you?”

“Yeah,” Jaq replies with no hesitation. His smile is watery. She’s not used to seeing him so open hearted either. “You really were. You still are.”

She returns a gooey smile, would hate it if she weren’t walking to her own funeral. She puts an arm around his shoulders, brings him a little closer.

“I thought physical contact was for the poor,” he says with a playful side-glance, and she narrows her eyes at him, with no real bite to it.

Then her whole body flares up, starting in her gut then spreading up to her temples, her elbows, her shin bones. Honestly, she thinks she’s been speeding up the poison’s process with the slabs of preserved proteins she’d been eating. Full circle, isn’t it— she tries to poison Westerley, now Westerley poisons her. The wave is painful enough to draw out a wince and a noisy exhale.

“Do we need to stop?” he asks, grasping her wrist and putting his other arm around her waist to support her.

“No. We’re almost there.”

They continue in silence as Kendry focuses on her breath. She’s getting colder. Jaq must feel it.

“What will I even say to her?” she finally asks. “When we get to her?”

“I don’t know. Something flirty.”

With a struggle, she eyes the signs still mounted overhead as well as the ones fallen to the floor collecting rust and cobwebs. Nearly dies right there when she reads them.

“We’re here.”

With some fucking pristine timing, the burning in her body expands. She stumbles backward. Hates with ferocity that she and D’avin had been in this very position not too long ago. He died with his hand in hers; the last thing she had said to him was that he was a fucking liar, people die alone no matter what. She chants in her mind her old heartbreaking recitation. Aneela should be here. Aneela should be here.

“Mom—”

“Come on,” she grits out, recomposing herself. “Just up the stairs. We have to get you home.”

* * *

The Black Rain pours, and it makes her impatient. She can basically taste them near.

“I’m going to have a lot of fun,” Dutch-Face says. “And you are going to watch.”

* * *

The reach The Royale, as empty and lifeless as it was when he was just here a short time ago. He and Mom huddle together on the floor by the bar, after he scours the place for any acceptable things she could wrap around herself for warmth.

Though the storm begins to slow, there is still nothing but wet acid outside.

“You know what’s funny,” Delle Seyah says, breathy, basically cradled on his lap. “This is the exact spot where I stabbed your Uncle John’s girlfriend in cold blood. After tricking her into a truce.”

Jaq clicks his teeth. “Nothing about that surprises me.”

“It’s what they get for literally handing me the knife.”

Her smile cools, her eyes fluttering closed.

“Hey,” Jaq says, shifting his knee to nudge her. Heaviness coalesces in his chest as the rain comes to a full stop. “Come on. Don’t be a quitter. It’s done.”

Her expression breaks into tired sadness, tears beginning to line where her lids meet. “I had one job, Jaq. I’m sorry I couldn’t do it.”

“It’s not over,” he says, starting to cry himself. “We still have time.”

The front doors swing open, the sound implanting the fear of many gods into his heart. His entire body grows cold, and he reflexively clutches his mother closer as Not Dutch stares down at them with a calm smirk.

“Guess it’s not your day, hybrid.” She closes the doors, unsheathes a dagger and brandishes it, specifically at his mother. “We need you alive for while. But this one, not so much. Any last words, human?”

Jaq looks up at her, frozen. Then his mother stirs to the sound of Not Dutch’s voice. At first there’s shock, a tightening of the muscles of her neck. And then a slow smile creeps up her face, her eyes hooded.

“Well aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

Not Dutch stops in her tracks. “Wh- What?”

Jaq scoffs incredulously, even as tears continue to form and fall.

“Still so pretty,” Mom enunciates with the little vocal strength she has. “And still so smart.”

Not Dutch’s face contorts, first to anger, then agony, then wistfulness. Her eyes shine with tears, knife still in midair. Hope blooms in Jaq’s chest.

“What are you saying,” she whispers. She blinks. “Why am I _crying?_ ”

“Dutch?” Jaq calls. “Is that you?”

She begins to shiver, dropping the knife and bringing her hands to hold her upper arms, brow creased and mouth hanging open.

“I’m remembering things of hers. I don’t understand. I’m feeling so much. What?”

“Hmm,” Mom exhales. “Khlyen could never take that softness out of you, could he, Yala? Even now.”

She approaches them with none of the murderous swagger that she came in with, and kneels in front of them.

“She’s talking right now,” Not Dutch whispers. “She says Aneela should be here.”

A tear rolls down Mom’s cheek, even as she’s still smiling. Not Dutch moves to take one of her hands in her own, her fingers shaping in an awkward hold.

“This isn’t so bad,” Mom says. “It all really does come full circle, doesn’t it.” She shifts uncomfortably on Jaq’s lap, grimacing in pain. “There’s something in my pocket, Jaq. Some insurance. Take it. You still need Aneela, whether or not I’m here.”

Jaq’s face screws up into an uncontrollable frown. He leans down, resting his cheek atop her forehead.

“I need you, too, Mom,” he says, voice so small. Like the child he never really got to be.

She weakly lifts her free hand out of the old makeshift blankets to fold her fingers over his. They’re so cold. Not Dutch stares in heart wrenching, quiet awe.

“We’ll come back to each other soon. In the meantime…” Her eyes close. She takes a breath. “Why don’t you tell us a story.”

Not Dutch cries. Jaq cries. Delle Seyah Kendry holds on to them both.

“When the days were deep, and the nights were long,” he shakes out in jagged breaths. “There lived a lonely wolf…”

***

She’s slips away quietly. Not Dutch kisses her once, on the lips, before she stops breathing. Jaq holds onto her for a little longer.

Not Dutch lies to a hatchling, says that the two targets escaped southbound, and it buys them time. She carries Delle Seyah’s body still wrapped in the blankets to a dirt hill just outside the Old Town perimeter, Jaq following behind quietly in their two-person procession. They dig six feet deep with shovels Not Dutch had procured. Before they put her body in the hole, Jaq asks Not Dutch if she can remove the elbow bands from Mom’s body for him. She does, and he puts them on, the ghostliness of having been on dead skin an odd comfort the way wearing his Dad’s vest is.

They bury her. Jaq sticks one of her arrows into the ground. His face stings from dried tears.

“Why did you help me?” Jaq finally asks Not Dutch. She shrugs, blinking away a droplet.

“I had to. It hurt so much.”

On anyone else, it’s an inadequate answer, but something in Jaq compels him to believe her. Dutch’s commitment to doing right by others was always so loudly unbreakable.

She turns to him. “She—Dutch, I mean—she wants to help you. I want to help you. So what now?”

Jaq takes out the piece of paper that Mom had out of his pocket. He had looked at it with bleary eyes and thus gleaned no meaning from it, but now he recognizes that the scribbles are a set of coordinates.

“We go here, wherever this is.”

***

“What do I call you?” he asks as she steers an old hot-wired market cart, now miles away from Old Town.

“What?”

“Your name. Do you have one?”

She moves her jaw around, eyebrows rising and lowering in thought underneath her overgrown fringe. “We don’t really have those. We just kind of are.”

“Oh.” He runs his thumb over the aged paper in his lap in thought. “What about… Dutchling?”

“What?”

“You know. Dutch plus hatchling. Dutchling.”

A smile spreads on her face as she watches the road. “She’s laughing at you. I think she likes it.”

Jaq smiles back, tentatively. “Do you like it?”

“I think I do,” Dutchling replies. “Huh. That must make the other one of us… Hatchneela.”

“What?”

“You know. Hatchling plus Aneela. Hatchneela.”

They’re still close, Jaq thinks. Just like they were in his world. Even as they’re separated by a whole plane of consciousness.

“She won’t like this,” Dutchling says, a little more serious now. “Hatchneela’s always been kind of bullheaded. And by always I mean since one month ago when she was born. She might stop us.”

“My mom had a plan,” he says, determined. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out soon.”

The engine inevitably busts out, but the scanner indicates that they’re near where they need to be. Dutchling dislodges it from the dashboard, and they take to walking on foot.

“This air is pretty rancid.” Dutchling’s lips smack together in distaste. “That Company mother of yours really did a number on this moon.”

The sun reaches its zenith, making their movements underneath it near intolerable. They follow the scanner for a few minutes, and find a hatch leading underground. Jaq remembers vaguely learning about the bunkers Land Kendry had built here in the Badlands, for the Vessel Program. He wonders what became of them, but he can take a good nauseating guess.

They drop down to a kind of foyer, with a hall leading down to a main room. Someone was here before, too and it doesn’t take much for him to figure out that his Mom and Dad had been here. It moves something heavy in him, the sadness returning. He sits down on the hard and musty couch, imagining the conversations the two of them might have had here.

Dutchling goes to what is presumably the kitchen area and opens up a metal ice-box, and then returns to hand Jaq a can of a fizzy drink. She plops down next to him.

“To being born a month ago,” Dutchling says, holding out her own can. Jaq clinks it half-heartedly. He’s nearly five months, but he doesn’t correct her.

He takes a sip of the drink, and decides it’s not for him. It’s just a carbonated version of some wine his mom let him try once.

“Is she saying anything right now?” Jaq asks, longing still lodged in his bones. “Can I talk to her?”

Dutchling looks at him, face in something of a sad formation. “The way this works is that the body’s original consciousness is reduced to a voice, a collection of memories. A second mind, at most, but even if I wanted to let her, she has no access to the body anymore.”

He deflates. “So no, then.”

“I can do what she wants, though.” Dutchling tilts her head. “She’d like me to give you a hug. Would you want that?”

Jaq nods silently, eyes watering. Dutchling puts an awkward arm around him, and it’s bony and uncomfortable, but she gets the hang of it when he lets himself sink into her. Utter strangeness of it aside, he genuinely is glad that she is here. Any amount of time alone after Mom had passed would have been unbearable. He would have given up, right then and there.

“This is nice,” she says. “Humans are nice. Pity we ate so many of them.”

Jaq winces. “Don’t tell me about that.”

“Sorry.” Dutchling sighs. “You know, the more I look into her memories, the sadder I get. There’s so much of it.”

“My other mom has about three hundred years of those.”

“Yikes. Oh, Hatchneela. She’s in for a storm. We had no idea. If _this_ is how I am after that Kendry—”

Jaq moves away from her. He wants to be mad, talking so casually about his moms that way, but it’s not like she really _knows_ how things are. It’s not like he knew much at one month, either.

“Why did my grandfather ask The Lady the put you two in their bodies?”

Dutchling shrugs, drinks from her soda through a straw she’d produced from somewhere unknowable.

“He didn’t want them to die. He said there was no other way.”

He shakes his head. “He did something to me. Something that brought me here,” he says. “But I can’t remember.”

“You said you’re from another world. What’s going on with us there?”

Jaq holds his arms, hesitant. “You’re all scattered across space. We’re trying to eliminate you.”

She sits there, silent for a moment. “Oof.” Then: “And Mother?”

“She’s still alive. But she’s human now.” He looks her in the face, and there are lines of longing there that he recognizes. “Do you hate me?”

“I did,” Dutchling admits. “Hatchneela _really_ hates you. We just want her back. You can relate.”

“Yeah, I can,” he says. Sighs. “I think I’m here because I need to fix things.”

“Fix what?”

“In my world I killed one of you, and it was haunting me for weeks. Your species are telepathic, and I’m kind of like, psychic, and so I think…”

“It opened up some psychic inter-dimensional time rift?”

“Yeah. Sure. That.”

He thinks back to the hatchling. Round marble eyes, ones you can’t really see until you’re up that close.

“In this timeline, it would be alive. I think what I’m supposed to do is find it, and. I don’t know. It would be so much easier if I could just S _ee_.” He pauses. “Wait, you’re not it, are you?”

Dutchling looks at him with confusion. “Am I not what?”

“The hatchling I killed. Would you know that?”

“Well, maybe.” She sags back, puts on a thinking face that has her jaw absently moving in strange ways again. “A telepathic signal as powerful as ours mixed with your abilities would have created one hell of a temporal rebound.”

“What?”

“Someone here would feel it. So if _I_ did it, even in another reality, I would have felt it. Theoretically.”

Her eyes track in some invisible route, connecting whatever dots she has in her mind. Then her jaw goes slack. She sits upright, turning to grab Jaq by the upper arms, startling him a little.

“What?” he asks.

“Your and Delle Seyah’s original plan. It’s still necessary. Because it’s Hatchneela. The hatchling you took out was her.”

* * *

When she finds Same-Face, she’ll kill her, and won’t bother putting her into another body.

The Kendry woman is dead. A still-clawed had led her to the sorry grave that they had made for her. She should pull out that arrow, snap it in two. Dig her up and feed her to her siblings. Place her skull on her mantel.

But she does nothing of the sort. She stands over the grave, an invisible force stilling her bones. All she can do is look at the dirt and imagine Kendry’s face the way the Aneela inside remembers her. Soft. Radiant. Ruthless. Tears threaten to spill, and she hates it.

A headache comes to her again, and she inhales sharply. She doesn’t understand why this memory she has no recollection of forming keeps returning to her. She hates the boy enough as it is, and she’d rather not see him any more than she has to. The way Aneela yearns for him every time compounds on her agitation.

She hears footsteps behind her, and hot ire rises in her lungs. “Khlyen. You’re back.”

“Aneela.”

She whips around, teeth bared. “That is _not_ my name. Your Aneela is _gone_.”

He stares at her, unaffected and with that stupid sad glint in his eye. She has no idea why Mother kept him around. No idea why Aneela had ever longed for him when every time she sifts through her memories, there are more and more reasons to kill him than she can count.

“You know she’s not,” he says.

She grips him violently by the throat, nails digging into his neck. “Why are you here, pathetic human?”

“I can get you The Lady back. You just need to let me look for Yala and Jaq.”

Something rancorous stirs within her. “You just don’t get it do you. You did this. You _did_ this.”

“What have I done but show unwavering loyalty to your mother?”

“You put us in these stupid bleeding-heart bodies, you cut us off from the hive mind. You put _him_ here.”

She tightens her hold. Khlyen struggles in her grasp, but his mouth ticks upward. “No,” he rasps. “You did.”

It clicks inside her. She has no need for him. The Aneela inside her rumbles. Enough, she thinks. “Die.”

His neck snaps with ease.

* * *

They resume their hike to wherever-it-is as Leith obscures the sun, enjoying a more merciful heat with the tradeoff of thicker humidity. The scanner leads them to an enormous gate, half sunken in a ditch of sand. From the ground up, it’s at least ten times as tall as Jaq.

“Looks like a big garage,” Jaq says, grasping at protruding vines to control his slide down the ditch.

Dutchling follows suit, and investigates the machine affixed to the side of the gate. “Password protected.”

Jaq frowns. “I don’t know it.”

Dutchling bends over to bring her mouth close to the machine, pursing her lips. “Aneela. Jaq. Dutch’s biceps.”

“What are you doing?”

“Guessing.”

Jaq rolls his eyes. He crosses his arms, thinking. Then he looks at Dutchling’s mouth.

“Oh,” he says, annoyed. He takes a tissue from his bag, and smears it roughly over her lips. Before she can ask him what the hells that was for, he presses the napkin to the screen, until it dings in approval.

They look at each other, and it dawns clearly on Dutchling.

“Biometrics,” they both say. The gate drones as it slowly rises.

“Couldn’t you have used something on her sleeve?”

Jaq shrugs. “She’d have wanted me to try this first.”

“Huh. Do you wonder if Kendry ever kissed your father, too?”

“Ew. No. Impossible. Dutch will tell you that.”

The gate rises to his full height, and bright lights shudder on to reveal a ship, parked right in the center.

“Oh, nice,” Dutchling says, but Jaq barely hears her. Without thinking twice, he briskly walks inside.

The drawbridge pulls down. It’s not a ship he recognizes—it’s not one any of his parents would fly. Too rusty in color, giving off an air of pretentiousness, though once he realizes that, perhaps _Mom_ would _._ It’s why she led him here, after all. He walks up the ramp, goes through the boarding room, then to the console room.

The key’s in the ignition. One of those old school aircrafts. He swallows, and turns the key.

The ship lights up, buzzes to life. A screen opens at the windshield, displaying a green dot. Dutchling soon enters the room, face unreadable.

“ _Hello. Welcome to Kendry Air_.”

That voice. Joy spreads all over him like a warm breeze, and it rises to wet his eyes. “Shell Seyah?”

“ _The one and only_ ,” she chimes. “ _Please state your name and rank_.”

“Jaq,” he says, crisp. “Jaqobis Ozzman Kendry Kin Rit. Your son.”

(“Gods,” Dutchling mutters. “What a mouthful.”)

_***_

He spends an inordinate time curled up on the pilot chair, just hugging the back of it. Shell Seyah has no idea who he is beyond name, but it’s fine. Dutchling tinkers with the console boards and the ancient wiring, narrating loudly that this heap of junk wouldn’t even lift off ten feet without some major TLC, do they even know if the roof gate is functional?

“I don’t think we’re supposed to fly,” Jaq finally says, understanding now. Mom left them insurance in case she wouldn’t make it. This was the insurance. He had said, after all, that if there was anyone who could bring Aneela out, it was her.

“She gifted you a ship you’re not even going to use?”

He lifts his head to look at her at the middle of the room, where she is putting a power box back together.

“How well would you say you know Hatchneela?”

“Pretty well, I guess. We did share a consciousness before we got put into Aneela and Dutch.”

“Do you think she’s on her way to us right now?”

Dutchling raises her head, the cogs in her mind turning. “I’d say she’s nearly at the door.”

* * *

She reaches the underground docking bay, and slides down the back of the larger sibling that carried her here. Patting it twice, she commands it to leave. This is between her and the two of them, now.

They didn’t even bother to close up the gate. She wonders what they have been planning, though it shouldn’t matter— she cannot die, and she will not stop. She rhythmically taps on the hilt of the dagger on her belt in anticipation as she enters, reaches the drawbridge, and ascends.

The Aneela in her head has been quiet. Perhaps she’s relented. Finally.

The ship is dark, lights powered down. It is silent. They mean to ensnare her; it’s like child’s play. The hatchling occupying Same-Face was never very bright.

“It’s time to come out,” she growls.

“Okay.”

She turns around to face the traitor. Snarling, she unsheathes the dagger.

“Hatchneela,” she says, holding a hand out. “Stop.”

The words stumble around in her head. She lowers her weapon. “What. Did you call me?”

“Hatchneela, you know. Hatchling and Aneela, Hatchn—”

“ _What_ are you talking about?”

“Like, I’m Dutchling. Dutch and Hatchling. Jaq named me.”

“He _named you.”_ She sneers. “ _Dutchling_ , then. It doesn’t matter what you’re named, you’ll still pay retribution.”

Same-Face—Dutchling—what _ever—_ has the gall to grasp her hand, the one holding the dagger. “Please, sister. Listen carefully to me.”

“I have no patience for you, underling.”

She gets an eyeroll in response, and Dutchling takes advantage of her own foolish hesitation to run the other way, down the dark corridors of the ship. Fucking hells.

It’s fine. She can take her time. She walks down the hall, peering into each low-lit room, waiting for a tingle of a presence.

_Hatchneela_. Hm. Might be catchy. Better than being called by _her_ name. How oddly, symbolic too: Aneela had named Yala, now Yala gets to name her.

She tightens her hold on the handle in flashing anger. This is nonsense.

Turning a corner, she spots an open door, with light shining bright out from it. She walks to it.

It’s a computer-room of some sort. The place is covered in monitor screens, with boxy tech older than Westerley’s wreckage scattered about. At the center of the room, a circular disc pulses with a soft green glow, inviting her.

She gives it a skeptical kick.

Then the light goes white, projecting an upward beam. She steps back, holding up her knife to it.

The light takes shape, brightness fading into color. The Aneela inside that was so quiet suddenly becomes, very, very noisy, vibrating in her skull, her vertebrae, her ribs, her joints.

“No,” she says. Heaviness rising.

Kendry stands in front of her, regal as ever. When she speaks, her voice is crisp, despite the static undertones. A Queen’s speech.

“ _Persephony, an old Qreshi poet, once wrote of her lost love, circa 779: ‘We crossed paths once. A thousand things happened in that moment, those months, every new minute. I learned how to live for twenty years I may never see. I learned how to be a me I may never meet. I never held your hand. I learned your name_.’” Kendry pauses, lifts her chin condescendingly. “ _I always thought Persephony was a pathetic lovelorn loser who didn’t know how to move the hells on_.”

Something shakes within her ribs, a tiny wave that grows louder. A laugh. Aneela used to read Persephony, before the green.

She suppresses it. She needs to turn it off. Why can’t she turn it off.

“ _But right now, as I think of you, Aneela. Perhaps some losers have a point_.”

_Turn it off_.

Kendry straightens her back, hands folded behind her. “ _I can make no prediction for what the circumstances will be when you see this. But if you’re here, it probably only means one thing. Well. I’ll make it short._

“ _I love you, Aneela. You were and are my everything. My hero. You always thought that there were parts of you that were monstrous, that you needed to fix, but every single thing about you is beautiful to me. From your bloodlusty temper to your tender-heartedness. The way you could… threaten to wear Liam’s innards as a skirt and then tell me you think my family is polite._

“ _The way you gave me direction. If I was your tether, Aneela, then you are my wind. You always will be, even if it’s you that puts me into the ground. All the gifts you gave me outweigh any and all betrayal. We crossed paths and truly, a thousand things happened, all at once. Maybe in another life, we’ll have more than just moments_.”

Kendry takes a controlled breath, wipes the falling tears with just one finger, graceful and elegant.

“ _I have to go. D’avin is in the other room pretending not to hear me, but I know he’s bawling. I told him he should do one of these for Yala, but he refuses. And_ I’m _the coward_.”

Hatchneela’s face is nothing but wet, now. The wave inside her is too powerful. It’s snatched her right out from the shore. The warmth in Kendry’s eyes pulls her right into the deep.

“Goodbye.” Kendry blows her a kiss. The projection phases out.

* * *

Jaq watches by the door, Dutchling behind him with a hand on his shoulder. He sheds his own tears at his mother’s message, sheds more at Hatchneela’s awestruck and silent heartbreak.

When the holo turns off, Hatchneela turns to them, slowly. The dagger hangs loosely in her hand until it drops.

“Come here,” she whispers, gently. It sounds so much like Aneela. He can’t help but to obey. He stands in front of her. She looks down at him with new eyes.

When he looks closer, she has become indistinguishable from Ma. A door has opened, and they seem to have merged.

Hatchneela raises her hand to put a thumb to his temple. The moment she does, they both gasp— Jaq is sent into a flurry of visions, the past tumultuous weeks replaying in fast motion. The Lonely Wolf. The Cunning Bunny. Killing the hatchling. The tinny songs. The King and the Tree. _What oceans and lakes have you nurtured?_ Breathing, stretching, fighting. Going too far, insisting on solitude. The syringe in his arm.

When it ends, they both recoil back from one another like they had collided.

“I remember you,” Hatchneela says. “You took my life.”

Jaq tenses, unsure if the shock will give way to anger, but it never does.

“And then you asked to bury me.” She exhales a jagged breath, a ghost of a smile flitting across her face. “All that time they were killing us, I had felt it. And none of our assailants ever thought if we should be buried.”

Hatchneela takes both of his hands.

“It all makes sense now,” she continues. “These visions I’ve been having. I brought you here.”

“Why?” Jaq replies. “Why me?”

She shakes her head softly. “Time is not so linear, little bear. This feeling that I have, in here.” Hatchneela raises one of their joined hands over her heart. “Her love for you, for Kendry.” She looks to Dutchling. “For Yala. It brought you here, to this very moment, to receive my message. I created a problem for you, it’s true. And now I’m here with the solution.”

“What do I have to do?” Jaq asks.

“Go home. End the war,” she says with urgency. “Let us be with our Mother again, so you can be with yours.”

“And if I fail?” Jaq tries to keep down the burgeoning dread. It’s always been in his hands.

But Hatchneela smiles. Dutchling joins her side, mirrors it.

“No such thing,” says Hatchneela. “Not when you have so much love around you.”

Jaq gives her a teary smile, touched. He steps into a hug with the both of them.

“Go now,” she says, when they pull away. “It’s time.”

She places a kiss on his forehead.

And he wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lines by fictional poet Persephony that Kendry quotes are actually from “October 18” by S. A. (2019), published in issue 5 of Wizards in Space: Literary Magazine. 
> 
> Also: Adelle being Kendry’s real first name is a gag / nod to strangesmallbard’s (upcoming) camp AU fic, in which her name is also Adelle.


	5. BAY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content Warnings: None, I believe… You can let me know in a comment if one applies.**

_3.11.1063 — Land Kendry Outskirts._

_Aneela._

The quiet, numb darkness slowly lifts around her. An awareness of her own body in space returns like a yawn.

_Aneela, wake up._

Jaq. The memory of him just moments before the world went blurry rises out of the torpor of her consciousness like a sprout refusing to die in the ground. Jaq. She needs to find Jaq.

“Aneela,” Yala says, shaking her shoulders. Kendry is at her other side, cradling her neck in the crook of her arm.

Aneela gasps awake, startling them both.

“Jaq! Where is he?”

Yala rises to give her an outstretched hand, which she takes; Kendry pushes her up as a springboard. Aneela looks around frantically, fighting the dark blue blurs clouding the periphery of her vision from standing too fast; they’re still at the beach, but the hatchlings are nowhere to be found.

“D’av’s trying to find him— Aneela, what happened?”

“I was attacked, I—”

“You’re hurt,” Kendry says, eyeing the already-fading bruise near her hairline. “Did... Did Jaq do that?”

“No,” Aneela shakes her head, grasping her hand. “The hatchlings were here. They attacked us. And Jaq saved me.”

Yala’s face moves in confusion, mouth opening and closing. “We got a call from Yalena earlier.”

“What?”

“She asked if we knew why Khlyen suddenly took off on a ship to come here.”

“He’s here?”

“No,” says Kendry. “Not that we’ve seen.”

Yala’s PDD rings in her pocket, and she answers. “D’av?”

D’avin’s voice comes through grave and urgent. “I can’t find him anywhere. But a guard told me just now that he saw him board a ship on the docks a little while ago.”

Something pangs in Aneela’s chest. “Papa.”

“Why am I not fucking surprised,” grits out Yala.

“Let’s go,” Kendry says, already making her way back to the estate. “And remind me to fire the whole fucking docking crew!”

***

Guilt calcifies unmercifully in her chest, hardening like the voice in her head. She’s failed, it tells her, once again. It seems The Lady in her ear had just been replaced by her own malicious words, cradled and fostered by time and observation.

She stands at the far wall as the other three shuffle around in Shell Seyah’s cockpit trying to establish connection with Papa’s ship. No one knows in what direction he had gone besides away. Gods, how much more careless could she have been? Why did she never say anything of the redness in his eyes when she checked on him at night? Which of her words and actions had led him to believe that he was supposed to _do_ something for her?

The communicator dings on, bringing her out of her thought spiral.

“Where is Jaq?” Yala demands at the screen, firmly and without greeting.

“Please stay calm,” Papa says, which only adds tension to Yala’s jaw. “I had to take him out of Qresh, it was the only way. The hatchlings were following him, and he was getting worse. He hurt Aneela.”

“That’s not true,” Aneela says from across the room. “He protected me.”

“That isn’t what I saw.”

The objection stings her in a way she can’t articulate.

“Like _hells_ it was,” Kendry asserts with icy rage. “You turn your damned ship around and bring him to us immediately.”

Papa shakes his head. “I can’t do that.”

“Let us talk to him, then,” Aneela says.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, either.”

It’s D’avin’s turn to vocalize his indignation. “What the hells do you mean by that? What did you do to him?”

Papa remains steadfast. “This is for the best. We’ll return soon, I promise.”

Yala scoffs, “Oh, because you’ve always been good at those.”

He doesn’t answer her. He hangs up. If aura had a sound, the rancor exuding from the others would be so, so loud. It rings through the air. Kendry’s mouth moves in vicious consonants and vowels that she can’t process; Yala tightens up like a coil; D’avin says something about killing him in the face.

Aneela feels like she’ll suffocate.

* * *

D’av notices her leave first. Dutch has to put a hand on Delle Seyah’s arm to put her tirade on pause when she sees Aneela exit to the hallway.

Delle Seyah stops, holding her breath. Then she closes her eyes, sighing. “Shit.”

“Should you follow her?” Dutch asks.

“I’m— it won’t be a productive conversation on my end,” Delle Seyah replies, shaking her head. “Perhaps it should be you. You understand her feelings.”

Dutch’s lips tighten, her shoulders stiff. She doesn’t answer for a while, and D’av can see the way she’s rearranging herself in her head. In the back of his mind, an alarm goes off.

“No,” D’av says, softly. “Don’t ask her to do that. I’ll go.”

“It’s fine,” Dutch protests. “She’s right. I should talk to her.”

“He was your bastard dad, too,” he replies. “You deserve the time and space to feel what you’re feeling.”

She looks at him, unsure, then nods. “Okay.”

“Looks like someone’s been seeing the therapist I referred him to,” Delle Seyah comments, quietly impressed.

“Yeah, well,” D’av says as he walks off to enter the hallway. “Your blackmail makes them good at their job.”

***

He finds her in the kitchen, hot tea in one of Dutch’s many ugly mugs untouched on the table. She looks at him once, then turns her body away, petulantly closing him off before he’s even begun. Still, he tries.

“Hey,” he says tentatively, standing at the archway. He doesn’t actually have any idea of how to talk to someone like Aneela. It surely isn’t like talking to Dutch. “Uh. Are you… doing okay?”

She narrows her eyes at him, still not facing him completely.

“I know I’m out of practice when it comes to social cues,” she slowly hisses. “But does it look like I am okay?”

D’av swallows and nods dumbly, internally kicking himself. “Got it… got it.”

He stands around awkwardly. She looks away from him again, this time turning far enough that he can’t see her face.

“Are you here to tell me you want to take Jaq away when this is all done?”

It takes him aback. “What?”

She shakes her head quickly, hands fidgeting atop the table. “It’s what you did when Yala nearly hurt him. I suppose I can’t blame you.”

The words settle over him slowly. He parses the meanings, knows that self-loathing language like the back of his hand, like the back of Dutch’s. He makes his way to the table, and takes a careful seat across from her, folding his arms on the surface.

“No one here blames you,” he says.

Aneela continues to refuse looking at him, even pulls her hand off the table. There’s a slight jaggedness to the way she breathes out, and he wonders if this is not so much an attempt to snub him but trying to avoid being seen with tears.

“I’m sorry he let you down again. After everything he put you through.”

She huffs, then, and turns to make eye contact with him. Her eyes are red-rimmed, like he suspected.

“You don’t think I deserved any of it?”

D’av looks at her incredulously. “I—What exactly do you think I think of you?”

Aneela hangs her head, face invisible again, as she wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand. She sniffles before finally turning around in her seat to face him fully.

“I don’t know. We don’t really talk. I stabbed your brother, after all.”

He rolls the first part around in his mind, and finds that she’s right. He had thought, before Delle Seyah’s say so, that she had tolerated him simply because Jaq loved him. She may have thought the same conditions applied in reverse.

“Well,” he begins, trying not to lose their progress—she’s finally letting herself be seen, after all— “I mean, I also stabbed my brother, once. Sort of. I was being mind controlled, so technically…”

It gets caught in his throat as he remembers it.

“I saw,” she says, not unkindly. “In the greenspace.”

He exhales. “Yeah.”

“How did you forgive yourself for that?”

“I guess… I haven’t really yet. You learn to do that slowly.”

Aneela scoffs delicately, looking off to the side.

“I’ve had three hundred years.” The faint sardonic twist of her lips fades. “I can’t let it go, the green. Even after it changed me. Maybe… I’m just a lost cause.”

D’avin finds his heart hurting for her. He thinks about what Delle Seyah had said, how her heart was so full and wide, so prone to spilling.

“Dutch doesn’t think so,” he says, firmly but gently, insistent. “Delle Seyah has never even thought there was a cause to be lost in the first place.” He pauses, risks a quirked eyebrow and a tilted head. “You telling me you think they’re wrong? Two smartest people in the J?”

A genuine smile spreads on Aneela’s face. The smile she wore when The Lady asked her to remember bringing Dutch into the world.

“In the universe,” she corrects. She extends that smile to him. “Thank you, D’avin.”

D’av chuckles, humbled. “Us kids of sucky dads have to stick together, you know.”

He could bask in the success of having a moment with _Aneela_ , but then he remembers why they’re having it in the first place.

“So I know it’s tempting to sit and sulk—”

“—I don’t sulk—”

“—Y... Yes, you do. But we have to concentrate on finding Jaq right now. And we can’t do it without you.”

Her brow furrows for a moment as she thinks. Then her eyes widen, snapping her gaze back up to D’avin and taking one of his hands in a firm grasp. He tries not to freak the fuck out.

“I have an idea,” she says.

***

She and Delle Seyah prepare a small goblet of green, using both their reserves. Once that is done, Aneela and D’av sit cross-legged on the floor of Shell Seyah’s medbay, both holding the goblet with one hand under the other, and with their free hands resting on the rim. Delle Seyah and Dutch stand to the side, watching carefully.

“Are you sure this will do it?” he asks.

Aneela nods. “Just like how I discovered your immaculate DNA the first time.”

“Whew,” Dutch mutters.

“Okay,” D’av exhales, stretching his shoulders and rolling his neck to psyche himself up. “I’m ready.”

They dip their fingers into the wretched nickelodeon slime.

It happens quickly. Like twin comets, their consciousness is flung into time and space, pulled by the magnetic force in Jaq’s very biology. Their forms speed through blackness and then finally, find purchase on a ship. Khlyen’s.

Taking in their surroundings, they split up in search for Jaq, neither of their footsteps heard by the other in their incorporeal movement. He looks through every room in the corridor as Aneela takes the adjacent hall.

He hears her gasp.

“Jaqobis. Get here now.”

He follows her voice, to the hull of the ship.

They find an unconscious Jaq, strapped to a medical table by the wrists and ankles. His chest rises and falls slowly, his face pale, dark circles under his eyes. Khlyen watches him from a chair, quietly. Next to him is a tray of syringes. Fuck, what D’av would do to punch this fucker in the face right now. Aneela rushes to Jaq’s side, inspecting him. D’av walks over to read the scanners on the dashboard.

Gotcha, bastard.

D’av nods at Aneela. She nods back.

In a blink, they’re back to facing each other, sitting on the floor.

“Did you find him?” Delle Seyah asks immediately.

“Fuck yeah we did,” D’av says. “Got the coordinates and trajectory right in my noggin.”

Aneela smiles with triumph. “I like you, D’avin.” She turns to Dutch with an approving gaze. “You two now officially have my blessing.”

Dutch’s blinks. “Didn’t exactly _need…_ ”

“Really?” says D’av, moved, and Delle Seyah stifles a laugh with her tongue in her cheek.

* * *

His mouth is dry and cottony when he finally comes to. Jaq squints under the brightness of the light above him, and coughs.

There’s a movement beside him, and the shape of it sends his heart pounding in anxiety. He suddenly remembers with clarity how he got here, stuck on this table.

“It’s too soon for you to be awake,” Khlyen says. Jaq’s vision blurs and sharpens on the syringe in his hand.

“Why did you take me away from my family?” Jaq rasps out, tears prickling the corner of his eyes. He struggles in his restraints, the futility of it adding to his dread. “Why did you stick that thing in me?”

“I need to keep everyone safe. Including you.” The warmth of his voice is a nauseating contrast to how he prepares the syringe again. “You risk getting taken over if you’re awake. You must sleep.”

Memories of the alternate world swim around in his head. He thinks of what became of his mother, of Dutch, because Khlyen had thought it was the only way they could survive The Lady’s wrath.

“Everything you told me,” Jaq says low through gritted teeth, “was bullshit. I never had to do it alone. It was never up to _you_ either.”

“You don’t have to forgive me for this, Jaq. You’ll understand later.”

He lifts up Jaq’s sleeve and holds his forearm down, and Jaq tries desperately to wrangle it away from him.

“No!” he shouts. “Stop it! I know how to end this!”

Before Khlyen can prick his skin, a blast is shot through the door and into Khlyen’s leg. The syringe drops to the floor and shatters, Khlyen grunting in pain as he topples over.

Jaq turns his head to the doorway, and nearly cries at the sight of his dad.

“Oh, it’s ending all right,” Dad says. He gives Jaq a brilliant smile.

His mothers and Dutch follow close behind him. He _does_ cry then. There they all are, together, whole, alive, ostensibly healthy. Poison and hatchling-consciousness free.

Dutch and D’avin drag Khlyen’s out-of-commission body to the side of the room, cuffing his hands behind his back.

“You’re lucky I don’t kill you here and now,” he hears Dutch mumble.

The other two come to the table, Mom unlatching his wrist restraints and Ma freeing his ankles.

“I know how to stop the hatchlings,” he says, pushing himself upright in urgency. “We have to go, we have to—”

“Hold on, wait a second,” Delle Seyah says, putting a stopping hand to him.

“No, we don’t have time, we don’t…” He hyperventilates, tears starting to blur his sight.

“For one second, stop,” she says again, firmer this time.

He obeys. Takes in a shaky breath. She puts a finger under his chin, bringing him to look at her.

“That doesn’t matter right now. _You_ do.” Mom searches his face. “Are _you_ okay?”

He feels his lip quiver, folding under everyone’s concerned gaze. He was so stupid. He’s been _so_ stupid.

“No,” Jaq whispers. “No, I’m not.”

Mom exhales, face calming. She looks at him longer before bringing her arms around him, nearly scooping him up, and he lets go of whatever heaviness he was keeping close. He curls up and lets himself be held by his mother, lets himself be held by his other mother, his dad, his complicated conglomerate of mother-sister-aunt— until they case him up in one big sphere of safety.

No, he’s not okay. But he will be. He can see it, now, in many streams. He will be.

* * *

_3.13.1063 — J-DAILY DIGITAL PRESS_ — By decree of Delle Seyah Kendry of Land Kendry and Aneela Seyah Kin Rit of Land Kin Rit, backed by RAC head commissioners Yala Yardeen and D’avin Jaqobis, along with sponsorship of The Company: hatchling eliminations are to be halted effective immediately.

Plans to terraform Arkyn have also been approved by majority vote. A formal commission led by Leith scientist Zephyr Vos has released a recorded statement on their objectives to create a habitable landmass for the remaining hatchling species in exchange for their peace:

“Sure, we all got off on the wrong foot. They ate us, so we hunted them. But times are changing. These creatures are sentient: they have thoughts and feelings, and a longing for home. Also, they’re telepathic. That’s some cool shit. In any other circumstances, we as a field would be _elated_ that a long extinct species suddenly cropped back up. What’s more, we should be absolutely balls to the wall thrilled that we have someone amongst us who can even talk to them. Hint hint to the politicians out there: killing a certain heir might mean your ass is getting served for hatchling breakfast.

“This all will take a few phases. First phase is rounding them up with a trusted team of Killjoys carrying out Level 3 warrants, accompanied by said hatchling whisperer. It will be gucci. Second, we have ventilators designed at the ready that will help hatchlings survive until terraforming is completed. This is the transition stage. Finally, the hatchlings will be free to roam on Arkyn, under orbital supervision. The commission is working around the clock to address the Food Issue. There are solutions; we will find them.

“Don’t question it, guys. This is the godsdamned future.”

* * *

_3.35.1063 — Land Kin Rit._

Dutch wishes she didn’t have to be the one to do this, but the only other person qualified was the one who had asked her to, so. She puts on her big girl pants, and heads to the Kin Rit Estate.

Yalena receives her in the parlor. She’s sitting on the chaise, hunched over and bouncing her leg, nerves wracking her body. Dutch breathes.

“Hi.”

“Yala,” she greets, trying on a smile despite the palpable instinct not to. “I had hoped I’d see you again in happier circumstances.”

“Me, too,” she replies sincerely.

Dutch takes a seat next to her rather than across from her, leaning her elbows on her spread knees.

The smile on Yalena’s face twists into the natural frown it wanted to be in the first place.

“Must you really do this to him?”

Dutch stares at the callouses on her hands, takes a moment to make sure her voice will still be calm when she speaks.

“Well,” she begins. “After the fiasco with The Lady and the children in Old Town, Pree and I were working on some new legislation to make sure kids were more protected on the Quad, or at the very least in parts of the Quad where they’re most vulnerable. Now, Kendry, though she swears up and down she’ll be a good person, is still a classist bitch who couldn’t care less about street urchins—her words—but she did… foresee the need.”

Yalena watches her, mouth tight. Dutch continues.

“It was when it became clear that Aneela still wanted Khlyen around. And you know Kendry by now—she has no qualms about twisting justice. The laws in effect would be retroactive, with no soil discrimination.”

The words sink over Yalena easily. “Meaning if it was done before, no matter where you did it, if you’re in the Quad or its orbit…”

“Yup. Jailed. If the charges are severe enough, there is no trial.”

Dutch folds her hands together, fidgeting. She looks at Yalena, needing to show her that while she will never be in opposition to these results, she takes no pleasure at giving this explanation. Not to Yalena.

“They passed last week, on plurality vote,” Dutch says. Yalena closes her eyes. “It was a rough sell, particularly for the Rinn family who, surprise surprise, are involved in an underground child labor ring on Leith. But still. It passed.

“Khlyen is charged on one hundred and six counts across eight violations.” She leaves out, for Yalena’s sake, that the number is that low because Dutch consented to only so many memory-dives. “So yes. We really must.”

Yalena leans back on the couch, tears falling. She shakes her head slowly. Dutch wonders if she had put it together, what she had told her back on the pulsar.

“He really fooled me, didn’t he.”

“It’s what he does,” says Dutch.

“I’m not exempt in Aneela’s suffering, Yala. Let me go with him.”

Dutch shakes her head. “Khlyen used up his chances dry. Aneela and I might have pardoned him but then he made the miscalculation of trying his shit with his own grandson. He used us to meet his needs, and denied it. It wasn’t right.”

Dutch grasps Yalena’s hand, looks at her with earnest pleading.

“But you… you still have some shots left. Stay here, and be the mother Aneela needs now.”

Yalena’s eyebrows scrunch in sadness, but smiles. She looks up at Dutch, strokes the back of her hand with her thumb. “I’m your mother, too. Yala.”

Dutch smiles, bittersweet. “Then stay here and be mine, too.”

* * *

_4.04.1063 — Alcador Asteroid Belt._

This was it. It was time.

With the provisions taken care of, a triple-check of the one-way transporter’s functionality, and another quadruple-check of the protective forcefield around the cube, Aneela sees her father off on his exile-imprisonment.

She stands in front of him, hands folded in front of her. He looks at her silently. All arguments exhausted.

“I knew deep down that I shouldn’t have trusted you,” she says, quietly. “You were never even sorry for how you played a god with my life. With Yala’s life. You let us suffer and cry and plead. All in the name of protecting us, of loving us…” She shakes her head, biting the inside of her lip to stymie any wavering resolve. “And, well, that was the problem, wasn’t it, Papa? Even when you weren’t hullen. It all just means the same thing to you. Control and care. Supremacy and love. I believed it, too, for a long time. But I know different now. I’ve known it for a while. And now is the time I truly act upon it.”

He looks at her with teary eyes and slumped shoulders. It almost gets her. “Aneela…”

“Enough,” she says. It’s all she says.

She turns around and leaves the mirror box, walks back into the ship’s cargo hold.

Kendry is there, waiting for her. They reach for each other’s hands instinctively, and it immediately balms the heaviness in Aneela’s heart. Beautiful, unrelenting Kendry.

Aneela kisses her firmly, fervently. Kendry has that post-kiss haze on her face when she pulls away.

“When we get home,” she says. “Do you want to go torture my cousins for a bit?”

A laugh escapes Aneela’s lips at the reprise.

“It would surely take my mind off things.”

“Okay. Let’s go torture my cousins for a bit.”

“Just a touch of psychological terror. Don’t want to nullify our marriage so soon.”

“As much or as little as you want.”

“And ice cream.”

The other two are there to receive them when they reach Shell Seyah’s console room. Yala wraps an arm around Aneela’s shoulders, and D’avin offers what Yala informs her is called a “fist bump.”

“Terrible fathers squad,” he says.

“Terrible fathers squad,” they all echo, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Aneela fondly touches her knuckles to his.

(“You know that just sounds like you’re forming a club of terrible fathers, right, Killjoy?”

“Listen, ‘Kids of Sucky Dads Squad’ is just an entire mouthful.”

“Orrrrr we could just have no squad of this sort. No squad is fine.”

“ _Thank_ you, Yala.”

“Y’all _suck_.”)

They open the cargo hold and release the cube. As they depart, Aneela watches the mirror box fade into a white dot among the asteroids.

* * *

_4.06.1063 — Arkyn._

It didn’t take long for Dutchling to find him.

Like her sister, she had snuck onto the Shell Seyah’s vents and ambushed him, but this time, it didn’t end in any knives stuck in anything. She had pressed her head on his, and he knew. And when he exclaimed her name in delight, Dutch had let out a resounding _what_.

She sits with him now, napping, as he perches himself above the an Arkyn crater, where plenty of hatchlings play below. Upon lucky discovery, and perhaps spurred by public pressure, they found that humans didn’t have to constitute the bulk of their diet—they could soak up toxins from the ground and in the air and convert them into safer compounds, weirdly like trees. It’s how they managed to survive out in the J for so long, Zeph had said, and also that it sounded way too much like a bad sci-fi drama tied up with a neat bow, but hey, this opens up way new venues for planetary restoration. Jaq is just glad this is all over.

His visions are back to normal. Still a little scarred from the whole ordeal, he avoids it when the haze of the future tries to call for his attention. But bit by bit, he learns to use it, to feel safe when he treads those waters, to follow those streams and rivers. It’s how he knows with relative confidence that ending the hatchling war will have been the right call.

Jaq hears footsteps approach him, and he stills, tries not to flinch. He knows she’s no threat to him now.

“Jaqobis,” The Lady says with formality.

“Hi,” he greets. “Just Jaq is fine.”

Her features move together in what he thinks is confusion. It settles. “Okay… Jaq.” She takes a seat on a rock next to him, primly. “Thank you.”

Jaq smiles, looking down at the game of soccer happening with one of the smaller hatchlings curled up in a makeshift ball. That’s got to hurt, but it looks fun.

“Thank Hatchneela,” he says. Turning to stroke the sleeping creature next to him, he adds: “And Dutchling.”

The Lady is quiet for a moment. “Did you… Name them?”

“Well, one of them.”

Dutchling stirs, makes some kind of telepathic happy-buzz when she senses The Lady there. She scuttles to her side and nuzzles into her, and The Lady smiles.

“Do you have a name?” he asks her. “Everyone just calls you The Lady.”

She looks off into the crater, absently strokes Dutchling’s back.

“I had one once,” she says. “Forgot it in the green. It was customary for us to take the name of our home, but I had been lost for so long, there was no home to claim.”

Jaq watches the contemplation shift into a ghost of a smile on her face.

“But I suppose there is one now.” She turns her head to face him. “Lady Arkyn. Of the Arkyn Moon.”

He smiles. He extends his hand out to her. “Nice to meet you, Lady Arkyn.”

Lady Arkyn takes his hand and shakes it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, amendment:   
> Sometimes a family is an infant teen, his dad, a former evil dictator, a centuries old mass murderer, her daughter-sister-clone-self, and an ancient species of space-spider-things. Deal with it.
> 
> And now, one last dance…


	6. SHORE - epilogue

Under the claim that the rest of her family is actually quite insufferable, Delle Seyah will agree to move their little family into the Kin Rit Estate, which will accomplish two things: the remaining Kendrys will up their ass-kissing, and Yalena won’t have to be alone after so many years spent in cryo.

They’ll redo the house. They’ll remove every vestige of sadness from the walls. They won’t miss what happened here, or what didn’t happen here, won’t cry about it anymore. They _will_ make new memories, and they will do it together.

Jaq will be the first to know after his Ma when Mom’s re-hullenization is complete, because she’ll go to his room where she knows he isn’t sleeping, and with a bit too much enthusiasm ask him to cut a razor into her palm. Ew, he’ll say. Don’t bleed on my sheets. Oh there won’t be bleeding, she’ll reply, because this shit is finally _done_ , Jaq.

The wedding will last a whole week. The first day will be a private ceremony with just Jaq, D’avin, and Dutch as witnesses. It’ll be at the beach, so his dad will at least have the excuse of salt in his eyes when he can’t stop sniffling. Aneela will recite a poem as part of her vows, either Persephony or Maraoli Ver, and Delle Seyah will cover her face in embarrassment because she had chosen the same exact verse. They’ll exchange rings, Kin Rit gold bands studded with Kendry amethyst, and when it’s done, they present Jaq with his first family ring. Even when it’s supposed to be about them, he’ll be getting the gifts.

The subsequent days will be various banquets, hosted by a Knight and Dame pair (or Knight-Knight, Dame-Dame, or solo, we don’t live in the light ages), in which they open with a long speech of love and allegiance to the wedded couple. To his mom’s absolute chagrin, they will, in every possible future, find a loophole to the festivities. Of course, the Perpetuum documents _never_ say that they have to follow Qresh customs, because of course, the Pact _predates_ unified Qresh. So of course Pree and Zeph’s will throw a banquet that is nothing short of what Dutch lovingly calls the trashiest bachelorette party in all of galactic history. Jaq will spend the entire night in a corner of The Royale II, sipping juice and obstinately ignoring his mothers, who, resigning to the whole ordeal, sit on each other’s lap and stuff wads of joys into the bras of several dancers. No one from Qresh will understandably be invited to this one.

He’ll meet Bea. She’ll look at him with shocked eyes and simply say, “Wow. You’re kinda big for a baby.”

The banquets that follow will be a little tamer, for Jaq’s sake. Liam will throw one solo; Bea will host the afterparty. Dad and Dutch’s celebration will actually be immaculate to Delle Seyah’s standards. Dutch will give a funny speech, or an emotional one, or both. Each end in the same result of the remaining royal families coveting her and Kendry’s very apparent wife-sanctioned affair, and Aneela shedding a tear when Dutch calls her the best mother-sister-twin-self she could ever ask—or not ask—for. Their gifts will be nice, too: two matching crowns, with Kendry and Kin Rit color motifs around the rim, jeweled with crystalized green.

It will be all nearly perfect, up until the very end, until D’av gives his personal gift to Delle Seyah. She’ll tear up shoddy wrapping to reveal one of Dutch’s horrid ceramic creations, with a sentence painted in careful script: “The enemy of my enemy is my alien baby mama.” This outcome will be in every possible future. One out of eleven futures that follow involve his Mom nearly breaking the Pact right over D’av’s head—and the remaining end with Delle Seyah drinking her coffee out of it every morning thereafter.

Yalena’s solo banquet will be the most moving, the whole day centered on Aneela, and rightly so. To my daughter, she will say with cup raised for a toast, who has taught all of us that we need not walk on our knees to deserve good love.

The final day will be at the Ancestral Hall’s ceremonial wing. Everyone will be dressed their absolute best, and even Pree and Zeph won’t pull any Westerlyn antics, settling into their capes and epaulets with pride. Jaq will be nervous, tasked with the role as candle-bearer, but when the moment finally arrives, he’ll feel the most peace he had ever felt in a while.

His mothers will be wearing the crowns they had been gifted. They’ll repeat the vows they had exchanged on the very first day, except this time with no accidental verse overlaps, and in the presence of hundreds with mics tucked into their collars, because of course it will be televised.

Dad will cry again. Jaq will, too. Even Ex-Seyon Rinn, from his cell in the jailer ship, watching on a static-y screen.

When it’s time, Jaq will approach the altar steps with the unity candle. Yalena will hand Aneela the gold candle; Liam will hand Delle Seyah the purple. Lit with a brilliant blue flame, they lower the wicks to the single one, until it too burns bright. Jaq will hold up the candle for all to see, and his mothers will seal their union with a kiss.

(“Go Lakers!” Pip will exclaim in the cheer.)

The reception is a fun time, in most outcomes. In a few, there is still a last-ditch assassination attempt or two, which all fail, especially in versions of the wedding that involve Jaq bringing Dutchling as a guest.

The Knights and Dames will all take their turns dancing with each other and the newlyweds, with the kids having their own dance floor to film their joy jocs. One dance will be between the Parent Council, D’av with Aneela, and Delle Seyah with Dutch. Dutch will say something like, “Can’t believe you liked me so much you went and got another,” or, “I always imagined we’d have our shot, but I never pictured it like this,” or, “Stepping on my feet isn’t effective flirting.”

Kendry will reply with: “Aneela is just the superior model, sorry,” or, “Oh, and what did you envision?” or, “You’re still dancing with me, aren’t you?” Aneela and D’av will watch with feigned exasperation. Though not part of the court, Jaq will get a turn with his mothers, too, impressing Delle Seyah with his faithful retention of the choreography, and earning some embarrassing “aww”s from the crowd when Aneela just hugs him and sways.

Then his moms will dance. They’ll forget that there’s a whole room of people, fitting perfectly in each other’s hold, each of their steps in perfect sync. It’ll be sweet. Xyah will make fun of Jaq for having such unabashedly soft mothers. In a handful of futures, he’ll say: “Okay, but how many times have _your_ parents been so in love they saved the world?”

***

That night, when Aneela sees Jaq to bed, he tells her that he saved a gift for her. He tells her a story.

_When the nights were long,_

_and the days were deep,_

_the gods gifted a king a magical tree, which bore magical fruit._

_The golds told him,_

_“Grow this fruit and eat from it._

_Plant the seeds on your lands, on your moons.”_

_So the king did. Eating from the fruit, he was_

_awarded with good health, extended life, and a calmer mind._

_The king had a son, a kind prince whom he loved,_

_and wanted him to be strong._

_So he gave him the fruit from the magical tree, so that_

_he may have good health, extended life, and a calmer mind._

_But the magic in the fruit was not as it seemed._

_The prince turned into a wolf._

_Unable to reverse his mistake, the King kept him on a moon, where he spent_

_thousands of turns in solitude,_

_where that loneliness would bloom_

_into an unrelenting misery._

_He howled every night in desolation._

_And then something miraculous happened—_

_Someone had howled back._

_The prince ran across the moon, in search of the source_

_and found another wolf, just like him, just as lonely, another child of the King’s_

_that he had unknowingly fed the dangerous fruit._

_They howled together—and another wolf found them._

_The three howled together—and another wolf found them._

_The four howled together—and yet another wolf found them, until they were many._

_They drove the King away._

_They returned home._

_They tore down the tree._

_They vowed to remain together, and ruled the stars._

_The wolves never forgot that they were ever lonely._

_They never forgot,_

_that they were ever angry._

_But as sure as there were stars in the sky,_

_They would never feel those things again._

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, Maraoli Ver is Mary Oliver, and Yalena’s line was a reference to Wild Geese.

**Author's Note:**

> MOONFULS OF THANKS to strangesmallbard and kshaar, who from conception to development lent me so many great ideas, in-depth feedback, and workshopped and brainstormed with me. They are basically this fic’s co-parents. We’re it’s parent council. It all comes full circle. An extra bow to kshaar who got me to watch this fucking show in the first place. 
> 
> Also thanks to my two wives who had to endure like two months of me typing noisily and endlessly while on skype calls instead of paying attention to them, and occasionally asked me if I was winning, son. Shout out to wife pastramis for tolerating questions such as "okay so what the fuck is a delta exactly" and linking me to Judo shoulder throws.
> 
> Thanks for reading. It was a long journey… but at the end of it was a self indulgent fic lmfao.
> 
> Let me know how I did, if you like :)


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